Each political note has its own anchor in case you
want to link to it.

My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable
URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription,
please report that as you would report any other broken link.

Some sites have paper tiger paywalls that can be defeated by deleting
a cookie. I don't post links to those sites because it would be
too complex to tell users what to do to avoid having to identify
themselves.

The attraction of these schemes is short-term: the cities are not getting
enough funds from the state and federal governments and can't maintain
their infrastructure. However, as Chicago has already learned from its
privatization
of parking meters, the long-term effects are to make the problem
worse.

Obama doesn't do 10% of what's needed to prevent disaster, and seems
to be in favor of increased drilling which means increased emissions.
However, that is more reason to express appreciation when he does
something.

In theory, cap-and-trade systems like these should work efficiently
to reduce emissions. In practice, the systems can easily have flaws
that cause them not
to achieve their goals at all.
Thus I think we should institute a real tax on fossil fuels,
rather than cap-and-trade.

I have some criticisms of Twitter in other areas, but no one could do
more to protect its users' from government searches. However, what is
needed is better laws: laws that recognize that the user is entitled
to challenge searches of her data stored in a company's server.

US troops that carelessly burned Qur'ans, and others that made a video
of urinating on corpses, were punished administratively.

I think this is, for once, the just response. There is nothing
inherently wrong in those actions, and the burning of Qur'ans was not
intentional anyway, but I'm pretty sure all soldiers were ordered (for
good reason) not to do these things, and they had no grounds to
disobey.

Like all laws against offending someone, this law is pure injustice.
It is also a ludicrous travesty of what the Buddha said.

If the Buddha could be reincarnated (impossible, according to Buddhism,
since he attained nirvana), he would tell the authorities and people
of Sri Lanka that their attachment to his statue and his relics is an
obstacle to their spiritual progress, and they should try to overcome
it through meditation and benevolence. But the Buddhists of Sri Lanka
would not listen.

Rich families there vie for the prestige of sponsoring a ceremony to
adore his tooth, permanently enshrined in the Temple of the Tooth.
Thus they convert his tranquil wisdom (albeit based on the
then-general assumption that reincarnation occurs, for which there is
no evidence) into competitive folly.

Mining companies dispossessed indigenous people in Guatemala thanks to
a US-backed coup, then took advantage of US-backed repression, and
then imposed
a "reformed" mining law to let them take what they want.

Guatemala's president should be in prison for the repression he led.
With him as president, the country is little better than Assad's
regime in Syria.

The border is a special case, and maybe it is legitimate for a country
to record the licenses of all cars that cross the border. It is
certainly not legitimate to show all those licenses to a private
organization. Meanwhile, this method is wasting opportunities
to block car theft.

The appropriate US agency should have a list of stolen cars' license
numbers, and check for those plates at border crossings — while
the car is still there.

"Free trade" treaties are meant to weaken democracy, by giving
businesses more power than governments. They should all be torn up,
for that reason. However, it's normal for these treaties to have
additional requirements that directly attack the citizens, especially
when the US gets involved. That is an additional reason to tear up
these treaties.

The war crimes of the rebels, which include ethnic cleansing as well
as killings, are a serious problem: they compel many Syrians, who
might welcome a secular state with human rights, to support Assad
instead.

The killer pulled out his gun but did not fire it. Perhaps did that
in order to get killed ("suicide by cop"). It is understandable that
the thugs shot him, but hitting 9 other people means they must have
fired all around.

Haiti's new constitution made the Vodou religion illegal.
Participants in a ceremony were recently jailed,
though it is not clear whether that is mainly about their religion or
instead for their political sentiments. Of course, it's a shameful
act either way.

The issue is about banning a protocol set up by Apple, available only
through nonfree software that (for your freedom's sake) you should
never use, which runs only on the malicious iThings which you should
reject also. But that doesn't affect this issue. If AT&T can
arbitrarily ban one protocol, it can arbitrarily ban any protocol.

Residents of Ahuas tell how the US-supervised Honduran troops
shot
and killed without warning,
brutalized people in the town, and refused to help rescue the wounded.
And then they tried to cover it up in several ways.

Although this article means to oppose those barriers, it unwittingly
lends them support by using the term
"intellectual
property", which refers to other unrelated issues at the same
time. Please don't use that term.

Privatization of any state function is bad unless it gives the public
a competitive market. The kind of privatization where the state gives
the contract to one company should always be avoided, because the way
the company profits is by shafting the state, the public, its workers,
or all three.

Alas, I don't see any sign that reduced US power will lead
to a better world order. Rising powers such as India and China
are no better (India keeps getting worse). And Russia is turning
into a overt dictatorship.

Perhaps these Republicans were misled by the name Tampa Bay Times
Forum. US cities nowadays consider everything to be for sale, even
the names of public buildings. I think that some company must have
bought permission to put its name on that building. The name might
give the appearance that it was a private building, privately
constructed.

The message was rude but made no threat. It only expressed an
attitude of disapproval and rebuke. I have no opinion about whether
that attitude was justified, but freedom of speech includes the right
to say such things (and even harsher) about anyone.

Writing a slogan on the wall of a nasty institution is part of
opposition, and this is its virtual equivalent. It is legitimate, and
should be legal. Please don't call this an "attack" or "hijacking"
because that is propaganda for those who don't want democracy
or opposition in the virtual world.

Such conflicts have gone on for a long time, even in the US (see the
movie, Shane). But they are likely to get worse in the future in
Africa, since population growth makes the existing supply insufficient
just as global heating reduces what is available.

Tony Nicklinson, who was unable to get permission for anyone to help
him die, died
of pneumonia.

Maybe his rejection of food since the court verdict, about 5 days before,
contributed to his illness. It is also possible that he refused some
treatment that could have cured it. Still, it seems like amazing luck
to develop a fatal illness so soon.

If Novartis wins a lawsuit about Indian patent law, various generic
drugs from India will be blocked and lots
of people in many poor countries will die. They will have been
murdered by the World Trade Organization, and the treaties that set it
up. Their funerals should be protests to abolish it.

The person in the article who criticizes the pharma companies for spending
too much on research is mistaken. Actually they spend only a tiny fraction
of their funds on research, and
farmoreonmarketing.

I disagree about the intervention in Libya; that one was justified
and didn't have this effect. (Libya still has conflicts, but
few want to go back to Gaddafi and few blame the US.)
The intervention in Afghanistan might have gone well if Dubya
hadn't invaded Iraq, but it is hard to be sure. However,
Kucinich's overall point remains valid.

If Assange had sex with a sleeping woman, the morning after they had
sex and then slept together, was that rape?
MP
George Galloway says
no.

Waking up your lover with sex is a tradition that has given pleasure
to many, and prohibiting it by designating it as rape is absurd. If
that's what the law says in some country, that law is absurd.

On the other hand, waking up someone with sex who is not your
lover (or has recently been disinclined to have sex with you) is
properly considered rape. Thus, the conclusion depends on
circumstances.

The circumstances described for Assange are borderline, but the couple
were lovers at the time. Their last interaction, a few hours before,
was to have sex. Based on the circumstances described in the article,
I agree with George Galloway's conclusion. I don't know whether that
description fits what happened, of course.

I agree with him also that the empire's crimes are a bigger issue than
this one. However, there is no need to make that comparison. Handing
Assange to the US is one thing; investigating the sexual accusations
is another.

If the two issues are to be tied to one single decision — if the
only choices are to permit both or prevent both — that would
raise the question of which issue is more important, which issue
should be the basis for the choice.

However, tying the two issues together is in itself incorrect. The UK
and Sweden want to do that because, for them, the sexual accusations
are only an excuse to deliver Assange to the US, but there is no valid
reason to tie them. The two issues ought to be kept separate, so that
each one can be handled on its own merits.

That's what Ecuador is doing: protecting Assange from the US, while
offering to cooperate with Sweden in regard to the sexual accusations.

The accusation sounds so implausible that it must surely be a lie.
However, ethically it would make no difference if the accusation were
true. There is nothing wrong with your burning any book, as long as
it's yours and it's not rare. You have the right to burn a copy of
the Qur'an, or even Free Software, Free Society, if you wish —
and anyone who tries to stop you is an enemy of freedom.

Copyright trolls, who threaten lots of people with lawsuits unless
they pay a medium-size sum for possibly real copyright infringement,
have inspired a phony copyright troll whose activities are
pure
fraud.

The funniest part is, this is not very different from what the real
copyright trolls have done. Some of them have been shut down by
courts for abusing the legal system.

If these workers had had guts, they would have gone on strike
and told the company to ask Romney to train their replacements.

Romney is fibbing when he claims
to have disassociated himself from Bain in 1999. However, it makes
no great difference that Romney is no longer running Bain. He built
this monster and set it in motion, so he's responsible for what it
continues to do, no matter who is at the controls now.

Romney is profiting from behavior that the US economic system was set
up to encourage. The system is to blame — and Romney is also to
blame. So are the politicians who set up or preserve the system,
including nearly all Republicans and many Democrats. In general,
when a system leaves you vulnerable to mistreatment, that doesn't
excuse the people who take advantage of it.

Hundreds of supporters protesting outside the courtroom were
arrested.

Other Russian dissidents are accused
of obviously bogus crimes too. It is misguided to argue that some
of these people are really innocent of the crime of protesting, since
it would not be bad if they were "guilty". Prosecuting protesters,
whether in Russia, the UK or the US, only proves the state is guilty.

The judge may be right that this is beyond the authority of a court,
but Nicklinson deserves to be helped somehow.

He has the right to travel, and the right to travel to Switzerland
since he does not need a visa to go there. Does the state pretend to
deny him this right merely because he might use it to avail himself of
the services of Dignitas?

Non-citizens are not entitled to vote in the US, and there is nothing
wrong in principle with making sure they don't. However, we know from
experience what Republicans are really up to. They will get a long
list of names of non-citizens, lots of them Hispanic, and exclude all
voters whose names resemble those, including lots of Hispanic US
citizens who are entitled to vote.

However, it is a long way from there to any practical effect, such as
denying licenses to old or new power reactors.

In the absence of a permanent solution, perhaps we should start moving
and/or converting the used fuel rods to a kind of storage that is
safer than pools next to reactors. The Fukushima meltdowns
demonstrated that that is a very bad place for them.

Streaming anything from YouTube requires running nonfree software,
which for your freedom's sake you should refuse to do. To view a
recording on YouTube without running nonfree software, you need to
download the recording. There are free software scripts to do this.
Whether the sites that are now being attacked can be used without
running nonfree software, I do not know.

In certain periods in the past, Palestinians committed plenty of acts
of savagery. In recent years those are more commonly carried out by
Israelis, as Gush Shalom ably documents. These ads are clearly
mistaken. Nonetheless, I defend people's right to express that
political view (or any other). There is no place for censorship in a
free society. Progressive views face censorship too in the US, and we
must continue to fight against it.

Note how the tobacco companies tried to use the vague, almost meaningless
term
"intellectual
property" to argue that the state must compensate them
if it does anything to limit their ability to market tobacco. This term
is harmful and we must reject it.

Slashing value from famous brands ought to be adopted as a goal in
itself, because those brands' marketing power and the outsourcing
system they support facilitates many abuses. We must reject the idea
of logos or trademarks as investment vehicles, and return them to
their original purpose: identification so that purchasers can know
what they are buying.

This demonstrates that the repeated official claims that this
treatment was for Manning's own protection were not merely absurd and
false. They were deliberate lies told by a cruel and arrogant state
that takes pride in its callousness. We have no proof that the orders
came from even higher up, but Obama surely heard the world criticism
of this brainwashing for a long time without stopping it.

Do the US government and US army have enough courage and integrity
to prosecute those responsible? I'd applaud if they do, but
I don't expect it.

I do not expect Manning's judge to dismiss the charges. The flaw of
all military trials is command influence: the judge is an officer
whose future career is under the control of the army command. In this
case, the judge's own superiors (up to Obama) ordered the prosecution
of Manning, and his brainwashing. He knows what verdict they want,
and he knows what will happen to him if he does not deliver it. To
refuse would take considerable courage.

I would say that the unions are not the root of the problem, but rather a
manifestation of it. The root is in the impunity these people have, together
with their incentives to commit abuse. The
New
York City thugs behave like an occupying army, not just towards
minority groups but towards protesters and the press.

Even worse, it focuses on issues that have nothing to do with the
safety of flights. In effect, this article admits that the TSA's
main activity is an unwarranted fishing expedition, with safety of
flights as a mere excuse.

We've known for years that Karzai's corrupt government cannot inspire
loyalty, except in exchange for money, so its army would never be able
to fight very hard. Now it is becoming clear that his soldiers are
likely to fight for the enemy.

Americans without health coverage sometimes must choose to die of
cancer rather than accept expensive treatment. A doctor recounts an
example.

With such advanced lung cancer, the best medical care possible today
might not have extended this man's life for very long. However, even
one extra year would have been a very good thing for his daughter.

I disagree with the article's claim that local elections are more
important than national ones. Back when Cambridge had rent control, I
voted in local elections for candidates who were in favor of it. Ever
since Cambridge rent control was abolished by voters outside
Cambridge, I have never heard of a single local issue that would
affect anything important.

Israel is trying to bribe
and threaten the Palestinian Authority into dropping
its bid for statehood.

The peace negotiations that Israel demands are phony, since Israel
demands impossible
terms and thus ensures they make no progress. In effect, they are an
excuse to let Israel do whatever it wants to Palestinians.

1/4 of US pregnancies are due to failure of contraception.
Implanted hormonal IUDs have the
potential
to put an end to this failure, but the US government has not
approved them for women with no children.

So why are Obama and Romney speaking talking tough? Because they are
paid to. The influence of the "fat cats" referred to in the article
does not come from conversation with thee candidates.

The brunt of the sanctions falls on ordinary Iranians,
but they don't have enough influence on the Iranian government to
alter its policy on such an issue — even if they wanted to
surrender to foreign pressure.

LendInk, which connected users to practice the limited "lending" allowed
by the Amazon Swindle and the Barnes & Noble Shnook, was shut down
by a campaign
of intimidation aimed at its hosting provider.

I would not endorse or support the use of LendInk, because to use it
you'd first need to be a user of those
freedom-trampling
products. That's what you must not do. Something like LendInk was
hardly enough to make the Swindle or Shnook ethically acceptable, so
closing LendInk doesn't make them substantially worse than they were.

However, I mention this to underline how nasty those companies are.
These products are the enemy of your freedom, and you should fight
them until they are dead.

I dispute what the article says about "illusion of control". It is
not an illusion; it is real control. To have control does not require
being immune to anyone else's influence (that would be impossible
anyway, in a society). Looked at from the other side, saying things
that influence people does not mean trampling their freedom.

This note doesn't deprive you of any freedom, but it may (or may not)
influence you.

I think Christian theocrats will rejoice at this.
They will be happy that thousands will be killed
as long as it might make some people scared to have sex.
If gonorrhea did not exist, they would want to invent it.

The ACLU warns that Maryland has set up an integrated system to record
license plate scans indefinitely, and explains
why
this is dangerous.

A similar system in the UK has already been used to sabotage democracy
by pre-emptively arresting dissidents believed to be on the way to a
protest. The US already persecutes dissidents as "terrorists", so
we can be sure the US will abuse this system.

Is this linked to global heating? We don't specifically know, but it
is the sort of event that global heating is making far more likely in
many regions. Also, global heating increases the amount of rain that
storms can deliver.

The Wisconsin massacre shooter was a neo-Nazi, and was connected with
white-supremacist groups that have grown
fast in recent years.

I would guess that the tremendous increase in poverty and suffering in
the US is partly responsible for this. People are naturally angry
at the events.

When they don't grasp who is really responsible (the 1% and the
politicians they have bought), perhaps because of propaganda that
tries to discourage this awareness, or when they feel that blaming the
true culprits is useless because they are strong enough to crush
protests, some may place the blame on convenient vulnerable scapegoats
such as immigrants. The harsh
anti-immigrant laws in some states are another aspect of this.

New York City, working with another enemy of your freedom (Microsoft),
has installed a new system of total surveillance.
Everything caught by the cameras is recorded and accessible, so it
is easy to backtrack and see where any car has been. Probably any
pedestrian, too.

New York City has a long history of oppressive surveillance. Taxicabs
in New York transmit the passengers' photos by radio to the thugs, so
I never take taxicabs there. By contrast, car service cars only store
passengers' photos; that system is tolerable since, if you don't
attack the driver (something I never do), the photos are ignored.

Hotels in New York City demand photo IDs to report to the thugs.
I refuse to stay in them — you should too.

This study did not cover the current year's US droughts, but they are
most likely part of the general long-term trend. However, as long as
the oil companies purchase the silence
of the politicians and the media, Americans seem unwilling to open
their eyes.

An increase in temperatures, even temporarily, holds
back economic growth in poor countries. So far, heating does not
affect economic growth in rich countries, even though extreme weather
events cause damage. It may be that economic growth in rich countries
is determined more by other factors.

Of course, economic growth is not guaranteed to benefit most people.
The US has had plenty of economic growth since 1980, but the benefits have
gone almost
entirely to the well-off.

The government's refusal to recognize that things are changing (and
will get even worse) is part and parcel of the shut eyes that are
letting society continue towards the coming train wreck.

The "extreme pornography" law is censorship for censorship's sake,
banning
ideas that someone found disgusting. Though
some of the acts it prohibits depicting would do bodily harm this law
is not concerned with whether anyone is harmed, since even animation
is banned. Meanwhile, movies show much worse bodily harm all the time.
Somehow brutality and even murder are ok, but combining them with sex
makes them bad. (I don't enjoy watching even fictional bodily harm,
but that is no excuse for censoring it.)

Since the US backs the coup-installed government that unleashed the
violence, that is a strange choice of place to ask. I expect the US
will tell him that everything is fine in Honduras and he doesn't have
a case for asylum.

The latest one was killed by a tear gas cartridge shot to his head.
This does not happen by accident; it is murder, because shooters are
trained to fire tear gas away from people, and they are skilled enough
to do it when they try. Israeli troops have killed
Palestinians this way.

Is it ok to destroy a meadow (or a wetland) if you create another?
Maybe in theory, but in practice it's no so easy to make them.

What happens if the new one doesn't come out right, or isn't really as
good as the other because some species fail to thrive. Will the
company paid to do the work recognize the failure and pay damages? Or
will it say, "We did what we agreed to do, so don't blame us"? Or
will it try to cover up the shortfall in results? That's what I
expect, given the low level of honesty in businesses today.
That's what happens with lots of carbon compensation programs;
they plant trees that would absorb carbon someday, if they thrive
and if global heating doesn't kill them.

Someone who participated in the start of developing the Arpanet (which
turned into the Internet) explains why government support was the
only way to get it going.

For the most part, he is right that the subsequent participation of companies
was useful for extending the Internet to more people. However, when what they develop is proprietary software, it leads systematically to abuse.

The story describes several other bad practices, but this one takes the cake.
(Please don't refer to the attacker as a "hacker";
that is derogatory
to us hackers. I'd call him a cracker, or perhaps just a hooligan.)

YouTube does this to lots of users. The idea of automatically
detecting copyright infringement is absurd. Similarity can be
detected, but determining the legal implications of that requires
both intelligence and more facts.

The UK's right-wing government has instituted compulsory unpaid work
programs; people are ordered to work for no pay (except their
unemployment benefits). A court rejected a challenge to
this on human
rights grounds.

Unpaid work programs will not help unemployed Britons find jobs,
because (thanks to the government's policies) there are few jobs to be
found. On the contrary, as unpaid workers replace paid staff, there
will be fewer paid jobs available, thus more unemployment.
Business will pay less wages, and workers will have less income.

This takes place as the US enjoys Vietnam's military cooperation and
invites companies to exploit Vietnamese workers.

The Vietnamese government has a policy of complete submission to
Western commercial demands — almost "Whatever you say, sir!" If
the US government said it would cut off trade unless these prisoners
are freed, Vietnam would probably free them

I am not sure what outsiders ought to do now in regard to Syria.
Assad is a murderous secular tyrant, and al Qa'ida would be a
murderous theocratic tyrant (even worse). Globally, Islamic extremism
is a bigger threat to human rights than Assad. Is there a way
Syria can become a democratic state that respects human rights?

Assuming that Romney didn't give false figures on his tax returns,
what might he be hiding? An income tax expert describes
some
possibilities.

The article ends with the absurd claim that "no one should begrudge
Mr. Romney or his family the wealth they have earned". What Romney
did to get this money hardly counts as earning it; it was
an attack on Americans that a democracy would have stopped him
from doing.

According to The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson, there is no clear
sharp line between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. The condition is
defined in terms of a group of characteristics, and people who have
enough of them are diagnosed as psychopaths. This means that there
are lots people on the borderline, perhaps numbering more than those
who are clearly psychopaths. This would complicate the issue.

This is because the government is controlled by the rich. Its' not
the same rich people for every issue; those interested in keeping
medical care expensive are not the same ones that want the state to
buy lots of weapons. But it's the same problem in both cases.

Thousands of children
in India are sold into slavery each year by their parents, who have
no way to feed them.

The children are promised a salary, then kept locked up for years and
not paid.

The root problem is that poor people in India are having children they
cannot support. India needs to reduce the birth rate; will fewer
children, India would be able to provide welfare funds to give their
families a decent life.

A few years ago there were five of those; now I think there are three,
which means this would reduce it to just two.

That they have even a ghost of a chance of being allowed to do this
shows that US antitrust laws are too weak. Companies that are among the
ten largest in any market should not be allowed to merge — period.

Subsidies for solar power have encouraged the
installation
of lots of capacity in Europe. The US ought to have them too.
It's the beginning of what we need to avoid disaster, and even though
not enough by itself, it could lead to more steps.

A group of subservient governments in the Planet Burner Bloc propose
to replace the EU's airline carbon tax with
"voluntary caps".
The advantage of these caps, in their view, is that they would not
apply until 2020, which gives the airlines 8 years to look for a way
to avoid really making any concession even then.

EU, stick to your guns! Americans must do all possible to pressure
Obama to stop opposing carbon taxes. This tax alone won't avoid
disaster, but the battle over this tax is crucial because a positive
outcome for this carbon tax could lead to more.

When I see a woman I don't know, and find her pretty, or sexy, or
both, the last thing I would think of is to insult her; the idea is so
strange that it makes no sense to me. (I could dream of chatting her
up and asking her to go out with me, but I would not expect success so
I don't try. I might attempt to find a way to give her a compliment.)
I can't understand why these men would want to insult women who have
never done anything bad to them. However, the facts can't be denied,
and these men's behavior is nasty.

However, being nasty must not be a crime. There are other ways
to teach men to act better.

Maddeningly, the US implores the protesters to remain nonviolent when
attacked, while doing nothing to stop the regime's attacks. By now
most Bahrainis must hate the US.

That might be a long-term vicious US strategy, designed to generate an
excuse for supporting Bahraini government repression in the long term.
US officials have said, of people imprisoned in Guantanamo on false
accusations, "By now they hate us so much that if we let them out they
would seek revenge, so we can never let them out." The same officials
could easily say, a few years from now, "By now the Bahrainis hate us
so much that we can't ever let them get control of their country."

This would be a small step in the right direction but would not come near
eliminating the problem of software patents. The most important thing
is not to let this distract us from demanding a full solution.

If the US passes this law, Europe should respond that "American"
airlines are welcome to stop flying to Europe if they won't pay the
tax. However, Americans should not net things go so far. This is a
great opportunity to condemn the politicians who have sold their
support to the airlines, and bring global heating front and center.

It is too bad that they repeated the propaganda term "piracy", and
that they suggested that "selling music with little friction" would
make things ok. I don't think it ok to make people identify
themselves to get a copy of a record, or to make them sign license
contracts for copies, or force them to use nonfree software, as
music-screaming services such as Spotify do. Out, out, damned
Spotify!

I'm sure a lot of the supposed cost comes from when Chinese spy on
trade secrets of "US" companies. For Americans in the 99%, this is
not a loss for us. The idea that we Americans should care about the
success of "US" companies is based on the suppositions that "US"
manufacturing companies would employ Americans and pay taxes to the US
government and states. Neither one is true any more. Why should we
care whether the company that manufactures goods in China is "American"
or "Chinese"?

The Senate and the House disagree about whether to extend part or all
of Dubya's misguided tax cuts.

If they continue to disagree, those tax cuts will expire entirely,
which is the best thing to do with them. However, I fear both parties
are sufficiently controlled by the rich that they will find some
compromise. Perhaps Republicans in the House will practice obstructionism
and the Democrats will surrender to it as they generally do.

The Federal Reserve is aiming to keep inflation low, which is good for
creditors (mostly the rich) and bad for debtors (most Americans).

For the past few years, the Federal Reserve set interests rates very
low with the aim of boosting business. It may have increased the
profits of some business, but if so, that did most Americans no good;
the business owners pocketed it. Only deficit spending can get
America back to work. The deficit will be somewhat less if we raise
taxes on the rich and on businesses.

An Israeli soldier explains that the purpose of checkpoints, often plopped
down on roads in Palestine, is to
be unpredictable, so that Palestinians
cannot predict what they need to do in order to carry out their lives.

It hurts the soldiers in their humanity, but it hurts the Palestinians
much more.

European pressure for Israel to stop blocking humanitarian aid
projects in the majority of the West Bank territory.
Israel's handling of Area C qualifies as ethnic cleansing because it
is meant to oppress Palestinians to the point where they will flee.

In Silwan, adjoining the old city of Jerusalem (and, I suspect,
illegally annexed by Israel to Jerusalem), Israel uses every pretext
to destroy houses and confiscate land. The inhabitants
resist
stubbornly.

Although Twitter seems to be fairly well committed to freedom of
speech and to privacy, it is strange for questions about what hundreds
of millions of people in general can say to be decided by a company.
It makes a difference that there are so many users. If Twitter had
100,000 users, I would see no harm in its making and enforcing
whatever rules it might prefer.

The Twitter user who insulted athlete Daley went on to make real
threats. I think those threats justify legal action against him,
in a way that mere opinion would not.

I disagree with the article on one important background point. The
article suggests that limits to freedom of speech are valid as a
matter of law, as if any limits that some government chose to impose
would therefore be valid.

I think that the limits on freedom of speech are an ethical question.
The UK government restricts freedom of speech too much already, which
is why it was so plausible to think the state was trying to go even
further.

I too wonder why Obama is so popular outside the US. People don't
seem to be aware that he supports torture, assassination and
right-wing economic policies. Of course, Romney would be worse.
We need Jill Stein for president.

US citizens: phone your senators to support the Shareholder Protection
Act, which would require large companies to have shareholders vote on
any political activity. Also send them email through this page.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.

An acquaintance in Romania told me that the number of voters in Romania
has decreased greatly due to emigration since the last census,
which meant that the referendum needed considerably more than half
the current number of voters to be valid.

The banksters' bailouts and tolerated frauds means that the idea of
private companies in a free market does not apply to them. If they
can go to the state to demand money and the state dare not refuse,
this should work the other way, too.

Punishing web sites is weak as well as unjust. At most it would make
the pimps find another way to advertise. If a state really wants to
put a stop to child prostitution, a few undercover investigators
pretending to be clients could actually do it.

Tiger poaching is organized crime. If poaching a tiger is cheaper
than raising a tiger, the poaching will continue. If the poaching is
fought strongly enough to make it more expensive, everyone will decide
to raise tigers instead. But I don't know how far away that point is.

I wonder whether fake tiger wine can be made convincing. Why would
a criminal use a real tiger if it is cheaper to use a fake?

A minister in Norway explains the decision to prosecute Breivik,
right-wing extremist, for his murders through the
normal legal
procedure rather than making an exception of him (such as
assassination or military kangaroo courts a la US).

This inconvenience to BART riders must be added to the much greater
problems imposed on the homeless by a city that wants to chase them
out. But then, most of them wouldn't be homeless if our country were
run to benefit everyone. The people now homeless would be better off,
and so would the local merchants who regard them as unsightly
inconveniences to business. Only the 1% would have less.

Chinese are following the path of the US, where the middle class in
1970 recognized that pollution was doing great harm and that clean air
and water were worth quite a lot of expense.

Meanwhile, in Italy, a huge steel plant in Taranto was shut down
because its pollution was found to kill many people in the city.
Paradoxically, workers there demand reopening the plant even as it continues
to poison their city.

I think this reflects the fear that Italians feel due to the euro crisis,
which was inherent in the system behind the euro.

Chambers should not have been prosecuted, but he was foolish —
to conduct a private conversation in the equivalent of a newspaper.
If you are going to post something in a public place, write it for
publication. When you want to have a private conversation, do it
privately, not in Twitter.

The Washington DC thug chief established a surprisingly proper policy
about dealing with citizens that record the activities of the thugs.

The next day, a citizen in Washington saw thugs beating up someone on
the street and began to make a recording. A thug grabbed his phone
and stole his memory card.

I suppose these thugs will fabricate some false defense and will all
testify to it.

Explicit orders are evidently not enough to stop thugs from attacking
possible witnesses to their crimes and lies. The only way to stop
them is to punish them for their lies and abuses. When current laws
make it hard to convict them, we must change those laws.

J. William Leonard, who was in charge of government secrecy for Dubya,
says the government's system of secrecy is "dysfunctional".

The article shows how right he is. Meanwhile, the US government still
refuses to declassify the memos published by Wikileaks. It can't succeed
in denying that they are accurate, since it admits this by prosecuting
Bradley Manning.

Ecuadorian officials say that both the UK and Sweden have been
unwilling to guarantee that Julian Assange would not be handed over to
the US.

The UK could insist Sweden not send Assange to the US, and refuses to
do so. This is more confirmation that they plan exactly that. The
quoted statements from UK officials, which pretend to reassure while
refusing to confront the issue, demonstrate bad faith.

I presumed initially that the game was proprietary, because the Apple Store
does not allow any free software. However, the developer has released
it as free software. I corrected the note to reflect this.

As for the medical insurance companies, it is interesting is that even
the requirement for people to buy insurance from them is not enough to
make them accept being required to cover people despite pre-existing
conditions.

The US should abolish the private insurance business by adopting a
Canadian-style national health care system, and applaud as those
business lose everything.

(Although Facebook uses the term "friends", that is an abuse of
language; a user's "friends" are often not really friends, and being
"friends" on Facebook is not the way to treat a friend anyway.
Therefore I propose the replacement term "ffiends", replacing the "r"
with the "f" of Facebook.)

The reason these people have a financial interest in the matter is
that they are among the few artists who profit substantially from the
current system. In fact, they are already rich, but not satisfied.
The musicians that we ought to support more won't get much from this
war.

I think this calls for a boycott of those stars' music products.
Would someone like to work on organizing and promoting the boycott?

Another earthquake and tsunami could happen at any time, so it is
crucial to make sure that the systems now in use to prevent further
disaster are protected from them. Also that these systems are
redundant and that plenty of fuel is available to generate
electricity. I don't know if this has been considered.

On July 24 I flew out of Logan Airport and encountered a TSA "pilot
program" which seems to consist of asking every traveller questions
about the purpose of travel. We were warned that if we did not answer
we would be subjected to "extra security checks".

The information I was asked for is public knowledge — I was
travelling to give speeches — so I did not refuse to answer.
However, after the TSA agents felt me up (I refuse to go through X-ray
scanners because they are potentially dangerous),
I asked what the "extra security checks" consist of. I was told they
would feel me up (as had just happened anyway) and look through my
hand baggage.

In other words, the TSA is going to pressure Americans into giving
information about their activities on pain of being harassed.

When today's business-subservient officials try to pretend that the
only solution would be a rain dance, they are trying to distract us
from the government's failure to regulate the banks and stop global
heating.

I was there too. The ARPANET was so called because it was funded by
ARPA (part of the Department of Defense). The MIT AI Lab was funded,
in the 1970s, mainly by ARPA. This included my work, such as the
development of the original Emacs editor, infrastructure that helped
many other projects both public and private.

Many of the hackers at the AI Lab were bothered by this funding, but
it seemed to me that funding from corporations was likely to have more
harmful result.

Note that the Wall Street Journal and Faux News, which are both
spreading this lie, are both owned by Rupert Murdoch's company.

The larger lie, that business executives are personally 100%
responsible for the success of their businesses, is false because they
depended on the society around them. But that's only the secondary
falsehood. The primary one is that the workers surely made some
contribution.

The right-wing denies both contributions to excuse the policy it
wants: for the executives and owners to take essentially all the
income, giving a pittance to the workers and nothing to society.

One thing not clear in this article is what case Garzon might work on.
Assange has already made all the possible appeals in the UK, and as I
understand it, that means there is no case left. If Ecuador grants
him asylum, there may never be one.

This is easy to do in a negotiation based on unanimous consent. The
only check against it is for some state to say, "You have ruined this,
so we will cancel it entirely rather than pretend it is not ruined."

Claims that Hezbollah (backed by Iran) carried out the bus bombing in
Bulgaria rest on supposed similarity to a 1994 bombing in Argentina.
However, the assertions about that bombing are questionable, making
the comparison inconclusive.

It's not impossible that Iran is responsible. That tyrannical regime
is guilty of numerous atrocities, as well as blatant lies and
injustice, against people in Iran and elsewhere.

But there are others in the world that are equally unscrupulous, and
the West has a long history of pinning the responsibility for bombings
on suspects chosen for political reasons. Consider for instance the
Pan Am flight bombed over Lockerbie in Scotland: a Libyan man was
convicted and imprisoned of this, but always maintained he was
innocent; other evidence suggests Hafez al-Assad (father of the
current tyrant of Syria) was responsible, and the west blamed Gaddafi
for political reasons and fabricated evidence.

A 5-year-old was hit in the eye with a "rubber" bullet (I think they
are steel coated by rubber). A thug dog bit some of the protesters,
and the thugs said it got loose by accident. You can't trust what
thugs say about what happened at a protest; they have practiced lying
so much that it looks natural.

Payá attempted to invoke a clause in the Cuban constitution
which allows a certain number of citizens to demand a referendum. His
petition was for a referendum to establish certain basic human rights.
Although he submitted far more than the required number of signatures,
the state never held the referendum.

He appreciated some of the achievements of the Cuban revolution,
and did not seek to turn Cuba into a US-dominated tyranny such as
it was before Castro.

This is a tricky issue, because both sides could be sincerely trying
to serve the same cause. WWF leaders surely think its deals with
business are inadequate, yet they could believe (perhaps rightly) that
these are the best deals it can get and better than no deal.

At least, they are better in the short term. They leave out the
question of whether endorsing a company that has gone part way towards
protecting wildlife is undermining the goal. If a company does only a
quarter of what it ought to do, maybe it should get only a quarter
approval.

The Liebor scandal, like many others, results from the systemic
effects of deregulation.

The article argues for breaking up the large banks and privatizing
some. I agree, but since part of the problem comes from complexity,
we need to simplify the system also. The obvious way to do that is to
ban most kinds of derivatives.

Savannah Dietrich believed her rapists were being let off lightly in court,
so she posted a statement about this and now faces jail herself.

Dietrich felt ashamed of having been raped, and afraid someone would
find out. That makes no moral sense — she was the victim, not
the perpetrator. She ought to feel somewhat foolish for drinking too
much, but I don't think it was about that. Because of this
unjustified shame, she suffered a second time, gratuitously. Who
taught her to feel this way? Anyway, at least she has overcome this
and is no longer ashamed to have been attacked.

Modern medicine, together with the obsession to use it to the last
gasp, implies years of dementia for a considerable fraction of the
population. The victim suffers for some years, and when he is too
demented to notice any more, it is the relatives' turn to suffer.

A change in the perspective of doctors would improve things, as the
article makes clear. They should stop encouraging people to bet on
unlikely chances and to grasp for more "life" even if it's demented.
But most important would be a change in the perspective of the
relatives.

When my father was demented, I visited him once. He was still able to
recognize me, just barely, and have very limited conversation, but he
would not remember the visit the next day. I concluded that my father
was really dead, even though his corpse could still walk and talk a
little. Visiting him was a pointless sacrifice; like any dead person,
he was beyond the possibility of doing anything for him. So I decided
not to see him again. If asked to take care of his corpse every day,
I would have flatly refused.

Why do many people go to such lengths to care for a demented parent
who is hardly even aware of them? There is unwillingness to face the
facts of loss: they don't recognize that their sacrifice is pointless,
because they can't bring themselves to accept that the person they
loved is dead. The breathing, defecating "living" corpse
superficially resembles that parent, and looks so lifelike that they
can believe that person is still alive. (This calls to mind the
ancient Egyptian mummification of corpses.) Even when they start to
recognize that the labor is pointless, they have trouble feeling
completely certain.

I am sorry for their loss, because anyone's death is a great loss, but
they need to face the facts and stop clinging to the corpse. It's not
a disloyalty to recognize that someone you loved is dead, and not a
disloyalty to let the corpse be buried. You can remember the
deceased, and honor that memory, in other ways.

I must denounce her opposition to abortion. While abortion is no
pleasure, it does less harm on the average (to the woman or the world)
than having a baby. And if you have a baby today, it will reach
adulthood in a world probably entering disaster.

This is not so much to prevent shooting sprees like this one, since
they amount to few deaths in the US (less than 100 a year, I think).
Rather, it is to prevent all the other shootings, which kill some
30,000 people a year in the US (based on the statistics in this
article). Stricter gun control laws could put a dent in that.

One of Shell's Arctic drilling ships came loose from its anchor
in harbor, and drifted onto the beach.
Following the normal behavior pattern of those that think they enjoy
impunity, Shell seems to have subsequently tried to deny part of the
events.

This accident may not indicate Shell was particularly careless; such
accidents do happen with ships. Either way, it shows that Shell's
drilling plans are dangerous. Shell should not be allowed to drill in
the Arctic Ocean, and neither should any other company.

Meanwhile, every ship can be put out of action due to accidents,
especially in bad sea conditions. Thus, having just one ship
to deal with oil spills, even if it is properly equipped and totally
up to spec, is inherently inadequate.

(That's even assuming that we had reliable methods for dealing with
spills from undersea oil wells, which we do not.)

Miners in West Virginia revolted in 1920 against a corporate-state
alliance that enslaved them and worked them to death.

The miners had every moral right to kill the "gun thugs" who had
killed so many of them, and to resist the state's forces when those
came to support the corporations. This conclusion simply applies the
principles stated in the US Declaration of Independence.

However, what achieved victory — for a few decades — was
not shooting, but voting for candidates who were enthusiastically on
the side of the many against the rich. Candidates determined to
defeat oppression rather than make excuses for it. Candidates
nothing like Romney or Obama.

The present .8C of global heating has a bigger effect than was
predicted, casting doubt on whether 2C of heating would cause
disaster. But the world is on track to burn enough CO2 to reach 2C of
heating in just 16 years.

This means I might actually survive to be caught up in the disaster of
global heating. And if you are young, you will almost surely see that
disaster, unless you manage to defeat the fossil fuel industry soon.

Namely, that the current US deficit is a big problem, that military
spending has been cut, that government health insurance is more expensive
than private insurance, and that Obama's health care bill will
cause a big budgetary problem.

The problem with Obama's health care bill is that it isn't going
to save a lot of money. It would take a national health program
to do that.

Someone should tell Orem that companies are not citizens, not even
under the
Corporations United
decision.
And they don't want to be citizens. Rather, they want the rights
of citizens without the duties.

One can question whether a bank should be allowed to close an account
because it "looks suspicious", but violating the trade sanctions is
more clear cut. It is clear that HSBC sought the income from these
accounts.

We ended the prohibition of alcohol, which was unjust and harmful.
The prohibition of prostitution is likewise unjust and harmful, and
must be repealed. If you don't like prostitution, nobody forces you
to do it.

Welfare recipients in the UK are supposed to be allowed to record when
they are tested for fitness to work, but they are being denied this
right based on absurd
excuses.

This fits with the perverse nature of the entire activity. What
difference does it make if someone is theoretically able to work, when
there are no jobs available? Would it be better if he got one of those
jobs and left someone else jobless instead?

These tests are evidently meant as an excuse to crush the poor, and
the company carrying out the tests is simply taking account of that
real mission when it judges people to harshly and denies them the
right to record.

Unlike some biofuel projects, this one uses waste and algae, not
crops. It is a useful approach, and subsidizing it in the early days
could be the way to get production started.

That alone does not prove this project is well-designed, or even
honest. But I can't see who in Washington we could trust on that
question. Any politician that opposes the plan is most likely doing
so in order to help the oil companies.

This is a small first step, but more is needed. Many (all?) GM cars
have built-in cell phones by which they can be tracked. I think
Zipcar tracks everywhere the car goes (can someone find out for
certain)?

John Brennan, who stripped
to protest the TSA's naked body scanners, had his charges
dropped. The judge ruled this was legitimate political speech under
Oregon law. I don't know whether the same would apply in the rest of
the US.

The thug who apparently killed Ian Tomlinson, a passerby at a protest
that was besieged, was acquitted. This
jury seems to have had some doubt about whether Tomlinson's death was
caused by the attack. Other thugs supported his testimony.

Since thugs generally lie for each other, the testimony of a thug
about what happened at a protest is always worthless. Other people
sometimes lie, but they are rarely habituated to lying like a thug.

The main beneficiaries of US "food aid" programs are three
giant agribusiness companies. I am not convinced that it is bad
to give hungry people food, as opposed to giving them cash to buy
food. The local elites would try to divert the cash; is there an
effective solution to prevent this?

Nor is it necessarily bad for the state to support farmers by buying
their surplus for use as aid. (The surplus could be cheap, if the
government looks for a good price, but this program seems to pay a
high price.) However, that is only a good thing when it supports many
small farms. Supporting big companies is not a valid goal.

The US could certainly buy the food for aid in a way that supports
farmers rather than the largest companies.

Apple censored a game for the iThings called Angry
Syrians, which is a political parody of Angry Birds.

If Apple had accepted the game, it would have been unethical
because it would have been proprietary. But Apple
doesn't mind that. Rather, Apple said it was "defamatory or
offensive" — to the dictator Assad, apparently.

A political crisis in Romania: the EU accused the prime minister of an
unconstitutional
power grab, an attempt to change the rules for removing the
president from office.

If the IMF-imposed austerity program was "effective", that probably
means it was effective for making people suffer. Indeed, a friend in
Romania says that the president, when his party was in power, cut
pensions, cut education, cut medicine (and that 12000 doctors have
left the country), taught religion in schools, and stole lots of
money. However, he says that the prime minister's party is corrupt
too.

I hope Romania does break its deal with the IMF. IMF "rescues" oppress the people of the country they are
made with.

A bomb exploded in a bus filled with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria,
apparently meant for murder
of civilians.

The Iranian regime has carried out plenty of atrocities (mostly
against Iranians, but some against Israelis), so it might be
responsible. Nonetheless, it is would be a mistake to jump to a
hurried conclusion about responsibility for this bombing.

Meanwhile, this wrong should not distract us from the much larger
wrong of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of
Gaza.

AT&T attacks network neutrality by trying to charge
specially for use of a particular communications application.

The FCC's network neutrality code is too weak, and anyway it makes a
special exception to be even weaker for cell phone networks.
True network neutrality means ISPs should not monitor or filter
your traffic unless it breaks the network.

The Pakistani Taliban are effectively holding thousands of children of
their own people hostage to demand an end to drone attacks. Whatever
one thinks of these drone attacks, and the US' policies that may
amount to war crimes, it
can't justify this.

For typical Americans, actually reading privacy policies of web sites
they use in a year would take 76
work days.

It is not a problem for me. I almost never read any of these privacy
policies, because even when they seem to say the company won't do
something, it has a subtle loophole. Meanwhile, the US government can
collect all the data with the U SAP AT RIOT act. So I just assume every
privacy policy says, "We will use your data in ways you don't like."

I maintain my privacy by generally not giving any personal information
to web sites I visit.

The main exception is when I want to identify myself to the public,
such as by posting a comment. I don't want privacy for the comment I
post.

For decades, Israel's governments have used the occupation and
"security" as cover for right-wing policies that impoverish most
Israelis.

They don't suffer as much as Palestinians, but still, it shows that
the occupation of Palestine by Israel is accompanied by the occupation
of Israel by the rich.

The Israeli wall was supposedly for the sake of "security",
but if security had been the real goal, Israel could have built it on
the frontier. Court cases and other evidence prove its real goal was
annexation all along.

Israelis were arrested for painting
over (erasing) racist "price tag" threats against Palestinians.

The occupation and its effects are turning the Israeli government into
systematic dishonesty, twisting laws into tools for political bias.

There are some exceptions, though. Nathan-Zada should have been
prosecuted for murder, not lynched, and the prosecution of those who
lynched him is the right thing to do, even though perhaps it is being
done for the wrong reasons.

The 2012 Olympic Committee's web site claims that you're not allowed
to link to their site if you say something unkind about them. This
has inspired lots of creative
defiance.

It is unfortunate that the writers of this site use the sloppy term
"intellectual property" to describe this.

The Olympics impose a wide range of harmful policies,
which is why I urge people in Madrid, Tokyo and Istanbul
to organize against holding the 2020 Olympics there.

Some (not all) of these policies concern one of the dozen-odd
unrelated laws that some people speak of as "intellectual
property"; but it is misleading to lump them together using that
term. For instance, this link policy is not based on any of those
laws. (Or any existing law, for that matter.)

What would then happen to Palestinians? Would they be given Israeli
citizenship, or exiled from their homes?

Perhaps this article
shows the answer: Israeli soldiers have joined openly in the
practice of destroying Palestinian farms, which formerly the colonists
in the "settlements" did (though the state did nothing to stop them).

The War on Drugs has crushed millions of people's lives but failed to
block the entry of illegal drugs; however, American drug users are
mostly switching to prescription drugs, rendering the War on Drugs irrelevant
as well as ineffective.

A person can decide not to use cocaine and heroin, but nobody can
decide not to get injured. Nobody can decide not to need surgery.
Nobody can decide not to develop a chronic pain condition. We
Americans must organize now to block the War on the Hurt before it
tortures us.

I hope that they don't omit the crucial requirement of allowing
redistribution and reuse of scholarly articles. That was part of the
definition of "open access" in the Budapest Open Access Initiative,
but more recent discussion often forgets this point since the word
"access" encourages focusing on the secondary question of who can get
the articles from the publisher's own site.

Republican politicians, however, are horrified by the idea. Is that
because of the money they get from the military-industrial complex
that a general, subsequently a Republican president, warned us
about?

I think the people who wear clothes with commercial messages (or even
prominent brand insignia) are suckers, and their doing so increases
the power of these brands, which is socially harmful. However,
banning some of this in one place for branding reasons is hardly the
way to oppose the power of brands.

I think the point is valid, but the article doesn't suggest an
alternative to "abortion". (It sometimes uses the term "development
prevention", which could be seen as an implicit suggestion of that
term, but that doesn't seem like a very good term.) Any
suggestions?

I also agree with the point that the "consumer frame" is not effective
for defending people's rights.

The first article's specific points are valid and well stated, but I
disagree with some background assumptions. For instance, the article
equates "capitalism" to the present system in which business dominates
government (i.e., the empire of the megacorporations). The US in the
60s and 70s was capitalist, but business did not dominate government
as it does now. As a result, many laws were passed to do what the
people wanted over the opposition of big business. That was democracy
at work, which is what we now lack.

Thus, what I seek is not "an alternative to capitalism" but rather
restoration of democracy (along with capitalism).

Genetically modified mosquitos, whose children do not develop to
adulthood (because they can't get tetracycline), could
wipe out dengue fever.

I think the approach is basically legitimate, and if the use of the
antibiotic tetracycline in livestock might enable a few of these
modified mosquitos to survive one generation, that can be prevented
through something that is necessary anyway: to ban the widespread use
of antibiotics in livestock.

However, the company should be required to release any and all
information about these mosquitos that is considered relevant to
public health.

Bei Bei Shuai, who faces murder charges from theocratic officials
for trying to commit suicide while pregnant, faces a further
injustice: prosecutors are trying to punish her lawyer for
requesting funds for her defense.

US citizens: if your congresscritter is on the House Judiciary
Committee, tell him that Lamar Smith's "IP attaché" bill is a
bad thing.

"Intellectual property" spreads confusion by lumping together a dozen
unrelated
laws. To be "for intellectual property" or "against intellectual
property" is a foolish overgeneralization, and this bill is based on
precisely such a foolish position.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.

Peter Sunde explains how Sweden pressed charges against the Pirate Bay
under the orders of the US, and then he was convicted of "crimes" that
were not crimes, by judges with corrupt ties to the copyright industry.

I am not sure whether advertising-supported unauthorized
redistribution ought to be legal; I think of it as a borderline case.
However, legal nonsense like this is intolerable. Swedes should
demand that their government respect the rights of the citizens of
Sweden.

If that means declaring independence from the WTO, so much the better.
The WTO is a murderous
organization and must be destroyed.

The dishonesty and subservience to the US in this case gives more
reason to think that Sweden plans similar dishonesty with Julian
Assange as well.

The Spanish government, under pressure for deficit reduction when
what Spain needs is the opposite, felt compelled to raise taxes. So
it raised the value-added tax, which falls mainly on the
poor, rather than the income tax on the rich.

If the WTO indeed opposes these plans, that is yet another way that
the WTO is a murderer and one of hundreds of reasons it must be
terminated.

As for whether this plan would reduce smoking, that is a good
question, but we should not trust anything the tobacco companies (or
their stooges) say about the question. On the contrary, if they
seriously object to the plan, that suggests it might be effective. If
they really believed it would backfire and help them, they would not
really try to block it.

It hurts to live in a disfunctional family. I am not saying we
shouldn't care about these teenagers' well-being, but rather that
helping them requires addressing these family problems. Even better,
preventing them — for instance, correcting the right-wing
government policies that cause material problems, and therefore
stress, for many US families would help a lot. Reducing the hysteria
about the danger of the Internet might help too.

Attempts to stop these teenagers from meeting someone to have a sexual
adventure with are misguided since they don't address the underlying
problem. They probably won't even be effective: if those teenagers
can't flirt with adults in one way, they will do another way.

A powerful solar storm in 1921 destroyed substantial parts of the
world's telephone networks. No subsequent storm has been so powerful,
but there will surely be another someday.

If a similar storm occurred now, it could destroy large parts of the
power grid, destruction that would take a long time to reconstruct.
Furthermore, nuclear power plants whose electronics are damaged by the
storm could have meltdowns when their backup generators run out of
fuel.

Citing the goal of "protecting children" (which shuts off the brain of
many adults), Washington and Tennessee have laws making it a crime for
a site to let users publish an advertisement for prostitution that
"depicts a minor" (whether the site knows this or not).

This law would require the same sort of massive vetting for all
user-posted material that China
recently imposed on online video.

If states want to put an end to advertisement of child prostitution,
there is no need to smash the Internet — a few undercover agents
could easily arrest the pimps.

Apple reversed its decision to drop the environmental standard EPEAT. The
article does not make it clear whether Apple will stop gluing the
batteries into iThings. I gather that EPEAT requires this, but I
can't tell whether Apple has decided to comply with the requirement or
whether EPEAT has made an exception for Apple.

Cheney hosted a fund-raising event for Romney, but reporters were
forbidden to photograph them together — Romney hopes to block the fact that they are associating
from reaching most Americans' attention.

It would be honest to take separate photos of the two of them at
the even and publish them side by side, along with the news that a
photo of the two together was banned.

And maybe someone who was there defied this order and took such a
photo anyway.

This is the cut that was agreed on as part of the law that set up the
supercommittee, because the supercommittee did not reach an
agreement. Since Republicans have already proposed to overturn the
military cuts, there is no reason to stand by the other cuts.

The US State Department says that the May 11 killers in Honduras were
the responsibility of the Honduran thugs and mercenaries involved, and
that the DEA agents were only their "advisors". However, the US
ambassador there said that those Hondurans under direct DEA
command. “They basically work for the DEA.”

Iranian exile Yashar Khameneh posted text and drawings that criticize
a historical Imam. Thugs in Iran took his father hostage, and threaten
to execute him unless Yashar Khameneh takes down the page.

It is a good thing that Khameneh cannot do that. I hope his father is
not killed, but if the thugs gained their goal through this threat,
that would be a defeat for freedom in Iran.

The basic principle for dealing with hostage-takers is not to give
them what they want. President Reagan betrayed his country by selling
arms to Iran in exchange for release of hostages in
Lebanon. Naturally, the effect was to encourage them to take more
hostages. Taking down this page would have a similar effect.

For Datacell, this is not just a business issue (though the cutoff of
payment from its other customers caused damage to the business). The
head of Datacell supports Wikileaks as an ethical cause, which is why
he did not solve his own problem by abandoning Wikileaks.

Almost 6 million US citizens can't vote because of felony convictions. A
substantial fraction of these people were imprisoned for possession of
small amounts of drugs. Members of minority groups are much more
likely to be arrested and charged for this. Thus, one byproduct of
the "War on Drugs" is to systematically disenfranchise people from
minority groups.

Right-wingers often make the absurd claim that Liberal regulations on
business are meant to interfere with business (rather than protect
workers, customers and the environment). Why would they imagine such
dishonesty? Because that's the way they do things.

A court in Iceland ordered the local Visa and Mastercard processing
company to resume processing payments to Wikileaks, but it is not clear
whether this will result in allowing people to actually send money to
Wikileaks.

The deforestation that has already occurred in the Amazon is
expected to cause the extinction of a number of species of animals
because their habitat is now
insufficient.

Worse, in a few decades the rain will be insufficient, and what's left
of the forest will burn up just as the dead pine forests in the
western US are burning now. (These trees are dead because global
heating has allowed pine borers to survive where formerly they could
not.)

The provision would involve putting dedicated personnel US embassies
to pressure other countries in favor of "intellectual property". Or
perhaps only in favor of copyright — by using the vague term
"intellectual property", the article fails to say what range of issues
this job would cover. However, we can tell it includes some bad
things.

A 2010 oil spill, the most expensive pipeline rupture in US history
and not cleaned up yet, was due to a company
policy of disregarding safety. This demonstrates that US
regulation of pipelines is too weak to depend on. The same will
surely be true for the Keystone XL pipeline.

If the individuals responsible were prosecuted and imprisoned,
including executives that pushed for cost savings and didn't insist on
maintaining safety standards, this sort of accident would not happen.

Seattle thugs broke down the door of some dissidents' apartment
— without asking
them to open it — and seized booklets that said "anarchist",
as well as a hoodie. It seems they did not find the goggles and gas
masks they were looking for, but if they had, so what? These things
are not useful for hurting anyone. What they are good for is
protesting despite state attempts to crush democracy. A state that
treats these as suspect treats the people as an enemy.

Someone in Spain told me that the miners demand is not necessarily
to keep the mines running (which seems like a waste) — some
other kind of work for their towns would satisfy them too. However,
the Spanish state is determined to dump more people into poverty so
that the banksters won't lose anything.

Argentina has blocked its citizens from getting foreign currency,
or taking it out of Argentina. This is a pain for my friends, but it
might make the country less vulnerable to being emptied out by the
rich.

He represents one viewpoint within the Taliban; others are more
rejectionist.

One interesting side point in the article is that the US
assassination of Taliban leaders has brought about their replacement
with new leaders who are more radical. This could be because they are
younger and have less experience and maturity. Thus, it could be that
the US's tactics make a negotiated solution impossible.

Part of the US government may have wanted this result so as to
assure it could continue fighting in Afghanistan forever.

New York thugs who felt in the mood to hurt someone arrested a
couple for dancing in the subway. They were attacked, handcuffed, and
charged with "impeding the flow of traffic" although there was just
about nobody around to impede.

To be fair to the thugs, one of the couple also began to record
what the thugs were doing and saying. Thugs go crazy when people
exercise their rights.

UK
policies threaten to turn the squeezed middle class against the
poor.

I think that is no surprise to those who craft these policies: the
banksters and their political servants. They must be chuckling over
the idea that two groups of victims will turn on each other, rather
than unite and evict the banksters from the City of London.

Israeli claims that Sarsak is part of Islamic Jihad. That is
irrelevant to the issue, because imprisonment without trial by a state
is more dangerous to human rights than anything an underground group
could possibly do. If he has helped commit acts of civil violence, or
war crimes, Israel could try him for those. However, Israel's own war
crimes need to be prosecuted too.

The UK has made "intellectual property" an excuse to strip away a
basic human right — against self-incrimination.

"Intellectual property" is a generalization about laws that have
nothing in common, in practice — except when laws like this
create something bad that they have in common. Making policy in terms
of "intellectual property", like using that term in your thoughts,
tends to lead to bad results and this is a prime example.

US military power is so far above the rest of the world that this
project would be misuse of the funds even at the original price. And
that's not to raise the question of whether US military power is a
good thing or a bad thing.

The European Commission is trying to use a free
exploitation treaty with Canada to impose on Europe conditions
comparable to ACTA.

The article is unnecessarily vague through use of the term
"intellectual property enforcement". That term refers to a dozen or
so unrelated
laws, and ACTA was only concerned with two of them (copyright and
trademark). So what are they trying to put in this treaty? Provisions
about copyright and trademark? Provisions about several of those
laws? About all of them? It would have been so easy to make the
article clear, if only Geist had not fallen for the chicness of
"intellectual property".

Of course, Europe should reject this treaty too. Will the European
Parliament have a chance to vote on it?

Indian soldiers disappeared 8000 Kashmiris, sometimes for no reason
except to collect a bounty from the government. Parvez Imroz traced
them to unmarked
graves.

India also practices imprisonment without trial, much like the US,
as well as torture that goes as far as cutting off people's limbs. All
this rather than permit the referendum India promised Kashmir at the
time of independence.

These reactors resemble the former proposed breeder reactors in
using liquid sodium instead of water as a coolant. This seems very
dangerous to me. Liquid sodium is highly reactive. If pipes break
and it escapes, it can cause a lot more damage, and make areas of the
reactor inaccessible for chemical reasons.

Taliban publicly murdered a woman they accused
of adultery in a town very near Kabul. However, Karzai's
government doesn't care much about women's rights either. To prolong
the war in hope of preventing this oppression is futile, and does more
harm than good.

Perhaps the only way to prevent the oppression of women in
Afghanistan is to give them a way to sterilize themselves so that they
can't be used to make more women.

It might do some good to arm Afghan women so they can kill men who
oppress women.

However, the response that is needed is to prosecute everyone who
played any part, as well as the banks themselves. The resulting
opportunity must be used to weaken them and take away their political
power.

Is it rational to use trade sanctions to achieve regime change in
Iran? Iran is ruled by a peculiar tyranny that allows a little
limited democracy. (That's what the US seems to be heading
towards.)

A few years ago, many Iranians wanted to change their brutal
regime. They protested but their protests were brutally crushed, much
like those in the US last year. Can hurting them with sanctions
enable them to succeed? That is not plausible. In addition, since
these sanctions are imposed by the US, they could easily lead many
Iranians to direct their anger at the US instead of at the Iranian
regime.

US policy on Iran is simply stupid, in terms of US interests or
stated US goals. It only makes sense in terms of the Israeli hawks'
lobby.

I suspect this is a consequence of global heating. Of course,
global heating by itself does not directly cause a drought in any
given year, but it makes droughts more likely in many areas. It also
makes floods more likely in many areas.

It seems there was good reason to think those men were fighters;
digging in the middle of a road is not a very common activity for
noncombatants. However, singing before killing people (even enemy
soldiers) indicates dehumanisation of them, and that is not a good
thing.

Republicans and Democrats argue over who
is responsible for continued high unemployment in the US.

They both are. It takes more than just time to address the
unemployment problem. It takes appropriate policies, such as
government spending to stimulate the economy, and protecting workers'
rights. Moving spending from the military field (where it generates
proportionally fewer jobs) to other fields also helps.

Obama did stimulate the economy in 2008, and it helped. However,
Republicans in Congress blocked further stimulus after that, and in
2011 Obama joined them by adopting the twisted goal of deficit
reduction. Thus, the wrong started among the Republicans but covers
both.

Ron Paul and Rand Paul launched an initiative against government
network neutrality regulations, and condemning campaigns in the name
of the public domain.

We could have honest Internet access without such regulations if all
Americans could choose between many ISPs. However, the only way most
US Internet users could have a choice between many competing ISPs
would be through government regulation.

Meanwhile, the idea that the government should be less involved in
copyright issues is absurd. Copyright on published works is a federal
law. Whatever copyright policies the US has will inevitably be chosen
by the US government, except when it invites some international
organization to deny the US the choice.

Most scientists in this field have a direct financial interest in
the success of GMOs, and therefore cannot be relied on to honestly
evaluate their possible drawbacks. Contrast this with global heating:
few climate scientists would profit individually by ending global
heating, but some global heating deniers have been paid by oil
companies.

This does not make proprietary software acceptable. Software users
deserve the right to change the program and to redistribute
copies. However, I wonder if the court would make the same decision
about the EULAs of ebooks. That would be a major victory. I also
wonder whether the court would allow publishers to make a monkey out
of that decision by means of DRM.

The article creates a phony appearance of irony by saying that the
workers are keeping capitalism afloat. Actually the governments that
serve the banksters are doing this, by exploiting the workers.

We must not forget the lessons of communist tyranny, that the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" turned out to be the corrupt
dictatorship of the party leaders; however, if we firmly insist on
democracy, a marxist perspective might help put an end to fascism.

Any lifeguard who obeyed the policy would have to spend the rest of
his life thinking about how he let someone drown. Perhaps this
company should add "psychopath" to the job requirements.

The argument about liability is ridiculous; there is no reason to hold
the company liable if a lifeguard tries and fails to save someone that
wasn't the company's responsibility. However, if use of a
subcontractors to hire lifeguards creates this problem, that is a good
reason to ban the use of subcontractors to hire lifeguards.

What used to be "extreme" still doesn't happen most of the time, but
it is no longer unusual. It is becoming part of "normal".

In 20 years, these events will be frequent, and far worse events will
no longer be unusual.

Of course, global heating doesn't explain why a heat wave happened at
the end of June this year, or why it did not happen one week earlier
or later. That is the randomness of the weather. Rather, global
heating skews the probabilities so that heat waves happen more often.

The crucial question is not, "Was this event caused directly by global
heating?" but rather, "Of the last 10 weather-related disasters
(floods, droughts, fires, big storms), what fraction of the damage
probably wouldn't have occurred without global heating?"

If you're going to reduce a deficit, this is the right way. However,
the time for a state to reduce its deficit is when the economy is
growing, as President Clinton did (he gave the US a budget surplus). A
recession calls for deficit spending.

Alas, the Euro mechanism doesn't allow deficit spending when it is
needed.

Peru declared a state of emergency in regions where local people are
fighting against potentially toxic mining projects.

If people could rely on their governments to prevent these mines from
poisoning water supplies, there would be no need to oppose the
mines. But few governments are strong enough, and honest enough, to
stop the mines from risking other people's lives and health.

ACTA was an attempt to impose nasty restrictions on Europe and other
countries in the name of “free trade”, which is
a swindle in general.

This is an important victory, but it's a defensive victory. The
people have not gained ground, only avoided losing ground.

Moreover, one defensive victory does not mean the threat is gone. The
US continues to negotiate the TPP, which is far
worse than ACTA, with other governments that want to give business
increased control over their countries.

Defense is not enough. We need to roll back the existing "free trade"
treaties that the empire of the megacorporations is based on. We need
to deny businesses the chance to argue, "If you regulate us, we will
move."

Unfortunately, it is because none of us can escape. There is no way
to save yourself from catastrophe on your own. Even a group can't do
much.

We are all in one boat and we know it. Either we solve this problem
together or the catastrophe will hit us all. The only actions that
have a chance of success are those that could strip away the dominion
of the fossil fuel companies over our governments. Any of those is a
long shot too. Perhaps Americans need set themselves on fire near the
White House; it could spark off a revolt, as in Tunisia.

The lesson here is that it is a fundamental mistake to trust a company
such as Facebook to give anyone data about you. It will give them the
data it wants them to have, not the data you want to give them.

The banks swindled around $30,000 per
person from the UK, while doing very little to support the economy
that they parasitize. The taxes they paid in a decade were wiped out
by the cost of bailing them out.

I agree that the UK's goal must be how to stop them from doing this in
the future. (The same goes for the US, except that our officials are
so quietly servile that they don't intend to think about it.) When
banksters say, "If you regulate us, we will move elsewhere," the
response should be, "How soon can you be gone?"

Illinois has banned the sale of shark fin, in an attempt to protect sharks. Several other US states have
banned it too, notably Hawaii which has a significant Chinese
population.

Shark fin isn't exactly a "delicacy"; that word implies that people
appreciate it for the sensation of eating it. Rather, it is a form of
conspicuous consumption; when you hold a banquet, you serve shark's
fin soup to show you were willing to spend that much.

To end the killing of sharks for their fins we need more action to
change this part of Chinese culture. In principle, anything else
equally expensive could do the job — it is not crucial that it
depend on a scarce resource from scarce animals.

US research into the effects of radiation on humans and other life is
corrupted by coming from the agency that supports nuclear power. And
the US government is surreptitiously raising various standards for how much
radiation is acceptable.

When a research contract at MIT studies the "difficulties in gainingthe broad social acceptance" of nuclear power, I'd say that
goes beyond the bounds of what universities should do. The project's
abstract clearly shows that the
goal is to convince the public to accept nuclear power.

The UK has a policy of rather brutally pushing people on unemployment
benefit to look for work, which goes as far as requiring them to work for no pay. It seems that the real goal
is excuses to cut off people's unemployment benefit.

It is obvious a priori that a scheme to push unemployed people to seek
work when the problem is a lack of jobs can't be a serious attempt to
address the problem. Now we can see what it is really meant to do.

The privatization was a handout to business, and never served the
public interest. Although in some cases there are competing train
companies for the same journey, the effective competition is not
enough to result in benefit to the passengers.

If B'liar hadn't been a right-winger in disguise, he would have
nationalized the railroads.

New Cisco "smart" routers seem to have a back door for Cisco to
remotely install "upgrades". Users were freaked that Cisco seemed to
say it would monitor users' connections.

Cisco says that was an erroneous statement, but even if this is true,
that doesn't make it rational to use these routers. The software in
these routers is nonfree, and if Cisco can remotely change it, we
cannot overlook it.

"Free trade" policies such as the WTO undermine democracy, both
indirectly (by allowing companies to threaten to move their business
elsewhere if states regulate them as they ought to be regulated) and
directly (with lots of rulings such as this). All these treaties need
to be cancelled so that we can restore democracy.

Persecuting the homeless is kicking the weak while they are
down. There are bigger evils in the US, but none more
mean-spirited. The demand for such policies comes largely from
stores. People should identify the stores in their neighborhood that
advocate such policies, and boycott them.

It would be correct to take appropriate action so that lion poaching
does not take off. Perhaps the sale of lion bones should be banned,
but I'm not sure: that ban might encourage poaching by removing the
existing legal source. In any case, I can't bring my self to say that
I want to recommend tourism to South Africa. That is because it
generally involves long-distance flights.

Demand-reduction through education of the users seems like a good
approach here. Repeat users of illegal mind-effecting drugs at least
know that they have a real effect. The users of these phony drugs are
only imagining an effect. They should try viagra instead — then
they would get their money's worth. If they don't know this, we
should inform them.

I heard about a video designed to drive Chinese men off the
superstitious idea that tiger bone, lion bone, or whatever absurd
irrelevant thing, would be effective as a virility medicine. It
showed tigers having sex, which does not take very long, and said
something like, "Using tiger bone you can last a whole ten seconds."
Why not play this on TV ten times a day all across China?

The goal is clear: a system of total surveillance that would be great
for repression of democracy. As for crime, I doubt this will be of
any use for preventing the most widespread and damaging crimes, such
as foreclosure fraud or
the purchase of laws that hurt millions of workers.

This is correct, but Bahrain must above all stop its repression of
protests. Amnesty International that Bahrain arrested an 11-year-old
kid and bullied him into confessing crimes which are just a way of
saying "protesting", and he now faces imprisonment.

Of course, what's even more frightening is what the state will do to
dissidents with all the data it has. While real non-state-sponsored
terrorists do exist, the state itself is a much bigger danger to us
and our freedom if its violence is not kept in check.

Perhaps some country (it does not matter which) should begin bombing
fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries around the world. Even if
this war caused a million deaths, that would be hundreds of millions
fewer deaths than climate disaster would cause. To be sure, this
solution is unnecessarily violent and drastic, since a treaty could do
the job and do it better; but governments refuse to sign such a
treaty, so what's left to do?

This represents nasty priorities, but more fundamentally, the question
arises as a result of a misguided policy: linking medical care with
employment. The US government should bypass this issue by funding
medical care with taxes — for everyone, whether employed or not.

Note the non-sequitur reason offered by Sprint: "We won't tell you
your location data, because we're not allowed to tell you some other
data." I don't believe they expect this nonsense to fool their
customers. Rather, they expect that they will never be called to
account for the irrationality.

Whether you can find out your own past locations is not the real
issue. The real issue is that companies store them and will report on
you. Being able to see how much information they store about you is
indirectly relevant, because if you could see it, you might not stand
for it.

I wonder if a state government could legally require phone companies
to hand over this information to subscribers.

A simple model using yeast shows how a stressed population can reach a
tipping point and collapse irreversibly.

Attempts at fisheries management that fail to take account of this
possibility are likely to fail disastrously — and since we
cannot determine where the tipping point lies, we need to be a lot
more cautious.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose attempts to roll
back Obama's health care reform. Also use this page to
send a message:

Here's the text I entered:

As your constituent, I urge you to oppose any further attempts to
repeal or restrict this important law. The only change that should be
made is to reduce our health care costs by establishing a single-payer
system as in Canada. The parasitic health care companies, which
secretly lobbied against this law while saying they were in favor of
it, ought to be removed once and for all from our economy.
Thank you.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.

This law was a step forward in terms of health care coverage. The bad
things about it are that it won't save any costs, because it fails to
remove the grip of the health coverage companies and big pharma.

The minister says the government "will" offer the evicted refugees new
homes — in other words, at some time in the future, not now. I
am sure these poor Haitians know exactly what a promise like that from
the Haitian elite is worth.

One idiot criticized the government for not putting out the fire
sooner. Clearly the firefighters are doing all they can. What the
government should have done sooner is stop the process of roasting our
planet.

Mondragon is an alternative to the stockholder corporation as a way of
organizing business, but we must distinguish that from free
markets. The word "capitalism", used to refer to the two of them at
once, obscures the point.

The next time Big Brother decides to bug your house it could be done
with a flying robot bug.

Present trends suggest that the US will strew these literally
everywhere, record all conversations in a complete behavioral dossier
for each person, and argue about whether a warrant is required to
listen to the recordings days or years later.

These developments demonstrate that the basic logic of US privacy law
is inadequate. If it is acceptable to take note occasionally that a
car or person passes by, that doesn't make it acceptable to collect a
large dossier on every car's movements, or every person's.

I will not campaign to keep inefficient coal mines running, or even
efficient ones. However, the state has the duty to make sure closing
them does not force miners and their families onto the street.

Under Spanish law, the miners will have to pay their mortgages even if
they lose their houses. Since nobody will buy houses in a ghost town,
the seizure of their houses will hardly reduce their debt. Even if
they could find other work, unlikely in today's Spain, they could
hardly support their families and pay the mortgages on the lost homes.

They may thus be forced to join the thousands of "fiscally dead" who
can only work in the underground economy, because any legally
recognized earnings would be directed towards debts they can never
pay.

This article from
2010 says that Lugo also bowed to the multinational land grab and
didn't defend the peasants who voted for him. However, if the senate
was against him, he may not have been in a position to defend them
alone.

Look at how the US government argues
that it's ok for DEA agents to put a gun to a child's head.

Aside the outrageous arguments and the factual falsehoods, worst of
all is the reprehensible moral distortion. To refer to grabbing a
person (child or adult) and throwing that person on the floor as
"assisting that person to the floor" must not be tolerated; everyone
responsible for making that statement should be fired for it.

Meanwhile, even though the mistake of raiding the wrong house might
not be anyone's fault, why shouldn't the state compensate the victims
for the lasting terror caused by this raid? Even in Afghanistan the
US compensates victims when it admits it attacked the wrong people.

This seems to have been political, like the attempt to remove Bill
Clinton from office. Whether it is really a disaster for democracy in
Paraguay, I don't know enough to judge. I don't know enough about him
and the situation in Paraguay to come to any conclusion.

He was interested in free software, and his aides invited me to Paraguay three times, each time saying he wanted to meet with me, but each time some other urgent issues arose and made him too busy. Since every "LUG" is really a GLUG, I wanted to ask him to change his name to Glugo ;-).

This makes me concerned that systems will read fingerprints without
our knowing. We may have to wear pads over our fingers in public to
prevent this.

The article claims that these systems will not be connected to the
FBI's fingerprint database, but that is beyond their control. Under
the U SAP AT RIOT Act, the FBI can collect all these fingerprints from
any company at any time.

I don't see any special controversy about using drones bombers in a
war zone where artillery or manned bombers might otherwise have been
used. Drones can kill civilians, but so can the artillery or manned
bombers. The issue here is when drones are used outside such areas,
in what fits the concept of assassination more than that of war.

There is nothing wrong with promoting homosexuality, but more than
that, arbitrarily banning an organization without a fair trial
violates freedom of association. The US also engages in such arbitrary
bans, which are equally wrong.

Israeli and international women dressed protested in Shuhada Street,
formerly the main shopping street of Hebron, which Israeli colonists
have turned into a Jews-only
zone. They were violently arrested.

This is the nonviolent action that Issa Amro was later accused of
helping to organize.

Whether "cripple" in particular ought to be grounds for arrest is a
side issue. the real issue is, this is entirely wrong. There is no
word which is so nasty that people ought to get arrested for saying
it.

Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning, although there are no
criminal charges against him as of now. Yet, when he offered to be
questioned in the UK by Swedish officials, they
did not take him up on it. UK judges twisted and stretched the law
to permit extradition even without an order from a Swedish judge.

The crime that they want to question him about is not rape. According
to published explanations, his alleged actions
would not be a crime in any other country. It is not nice
conduct, to be sure, but that is not the same as rape.

I have read that Sweden has an arrangement with the US whereby it
would hand him over to the US on a mere request. That would be a bad
thing.

It would be improper for Ecuador to shield Assange from possible sex
charges. I suggest that Ecuador invite Swedish officials to question
Assange in the embassy or in Ecuador. If he is subsequently charged
in Sweden, Ecuador could approve his extradition to Sweden on the
condition that Sweden not hand him over to the US, but rather let him
return to Ecuador if acquitted, or at the end of his sentence if he is
found guilty.

What convinced me this was done by Assad's men was the testimony
attributed to an army defector. I wonder if it is possible to
confront him with these claims.

I don't think that the Christian religious orders are implicitly
trustworthy either. Assad protects them and they are afraid that
Sunni fanatics will kill them. This could lead them to lie about
massacres. At the same time, it reflects real danger from armed
Sunni groups that have been supported by other countries.

The nonviolent protests of 2011 were nonsectarian. Assad wanted to
turn it into a sectarian conflict, and outside Sunni states wanted the
same thing. Now they have both got their gruesome wish.

The report fails to criticize the worst thing about Oakland's
response: the fact that it shut down the Occupy encampment and led the
wave of attacks that eliminate the right to make protest camps in the
US.

They surely did, but Obama helped them along by failing to campaign
publicly for stimulus policies, or for tax increases on the
rich. Obama even endorsed the goal of cutting the deficit during a
recession.

A software patent is the immediate cause of this nastiness, but what
gave it the opportunity to do so is something even nastier: Apple's
unjust power over the iThings.

What put Apple in a position to decide whether her parents can get
this app? The system software of the iThings is malicious, set up to
let Apple decide what programs users can install. Apple practices
arbitrary censorship, and not just in this instance.

What put Apple in a position to remotely delete this app? Another
malicious feature, called a "back door", which is designed to let
Apple remotely delete installed apps.

The iThings are designed as jails for their users. Gilded jails, but
still jails. They were lured in by the gilding, but and now they see
the door shutting.

Meanwhile, suppose the company that made the app loses the lawsuit or
settles it with an agreement not to distribute that app. That too
would stop Maya from ever getting another copy. Why is this? Because
the program is _proprietary software_, controlled by that company and
not by its users.

What Maya really needs is to replace that program with
free/libre
software, software controlled by its users.

From what I've read, one small correction is called for: Al Qa'ida was
set up by Pakistan's intelligence service to support the resistance
against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, and was later turned to
another purpose.

I am not sure what position to take on the immigration issue in
general; I do not think countries are in general obliged to let
everyone in. However, this policy is clearly right for those children
who hardly know any other country.

The root of the problem are that taxes on these companies are too
low. The government should take money from them to finance this
research, so that the companies get no control or influence over the
research.

The UK government is for fossil fuel and nuclear power, and opposed to
renewable energy. It has weakened or canceled nearly all of Labour's
programs to reduce CO2 emissions, but continues to pretend
it is for renewable energy.

Peter Van Buren — being fired by the State Department for
posting a link to a published Wikileaks document — writes about
how Obama's persecution of whistleblowers is making
the US like a military dictatorship he once lived in.

He warns us that the policy of "classify everything, then leak what
makes the government look good" leads to a journalism which is
effectively censored.

Australia's new marine reserves may not achieve their purpose due to
exceptions
made to cater to the fishing and mining companies.

You can see in the wheedling words of the prime minister why this
happened. We can't protect nature (which means, human survival) and
keep business happy at the same time. We need governments prepared to
be as tough as Rambo toward any business that gets in the way of
protecting the Earth.

If you take US rhetoric at face value, and suppose that the US government wants to wipe out al Qa'ida, this would imply that the drone attacks are a self-defeating tactic.

However, what if that is just a pretense and the real desire of the US government is to have a war it can fight forever? An excuse to eliminate civil liberties and reduce most Americans to abject poverty without opportunity? Judged this way, the drone attacks would be a great success.

The discussion of which data can be accessed under which conditions is a decoy from the real issue: the fundamental increase in surveillance which is going on: the policy of making a total dossier on each person.

The article confuses the proposed system with the patent. The proposed system is what matters. The patent has no effect on students, except that it might be an disincentive to implement the system. The only ethical issue about the patent itself is that it is a business method patent, which is a kind of software patent, and those should not exist.

What can we say about the proposed system? It involves corrupting schools, turning them into marketing agents for publishers. Any school that requires students to obtain a book in a specific way should be shut down.

I doubt that "child" pornography, even when it really depicts children and not postpuberal teenagers, plays a big role in leading people to sexually abuse children, because adults have done this for a long time even though porn was not available. In any case, the main risk to a child comes from people in the family.

So I think this is simply an example of a common political phenomenon: a phony solution that allows politicians to pretend they are doing something, while serving other interests (the copyright industry) and harming the public.

By contrast, governments rarely ignore the nasty copyright treaties they sign. I suspect that's because business power wants the copyright treaties obeyed while it sabotages the environmental treaties.

Osama bin Laden tried to continue directing Qa'ida, but its affiliate groups didn't listen to him, making him irrelevant to events.

This is more reason why his death was no real gain for the US.

He tried to focus the affiliate groups on attacking the US, but they instead focusing on attacking local enemies. Perhaps that's part of the reason why the danger to Americans from terrorism is so low as to be negligible. Americans are more likely to be killed by their own furniture.

Israel threatens to demolish the school of Jinba cave village in the West Bank, as well as the solar power facility and road. But teachers can't reach the village to teach, there because Israeli soldiers took their van.

The area was declared a zone for military exercises, apparently as an excuse to get rid of the village because it isn't really used as such.

Many states in the US have suppressed journalism about the treatment of farm animals by banning investigative reporters from lying on job applications. This means they cannot hide the fact that they are reporters.

Such harmless deception is legitimate and necessary in order to expose abuses by business.

20 years ago, the power of business was less, and governments could make agreements to protect the environment. Today that is impossible because business interests won't let states cede an inch. They will fight to the end over whatever scraps they don't manage to destroy in the process.

Billionaire Polluters have compelled scientists who did research into the effects of the Big Spill to hand over their private emails. The scientists fear these will be taken out of context, misinterpreted, and used to attack them.

I don't understand the logic of this decision, since the scientists were in no way involved in the events that caused the spill and therefore cannot be expected to have any special information about them.

Humanity's tremendous changes in the ocean mostly go unnoticed, because they are gradual. A book documents with photos how large fish were wiped out, across 30 years. It also shows how protecting fisheries can bring back stocks that are almost gone.

Although the details of fisheries management are complex, the basic idea is simple: give priority to the long term, and the fishermen must adapt to that.

Israel will not prosecute the orthodox rabbis who wrote that it is ok to kill Gentile children to stop them from growing up and killing Jews.

The author thinks that Israel's prohibition of "hate speech" is a good thing, and claims with regret that this decision has effectively made it null and void. I disagree, because that law is censorship. The wrong is not that religious speech is exempt from censorship, but that nonreligious speech is subject to censorship.

While I totally disagree with the views of these rabbis, just as I disagree with the cruel views of right-wing American politicians and Islamists, they all deserve the right to state their views.

Although this causes inconvenience for those whose tax refunds are delayed, it is good for the US as a whole because it puts money into the economy — just what the Republicans have blocked for two years.

What is unfortunate about this is that it encourages lying. It would be better to stimulate the economy by paying people to do useful public works.

Sam Harris made an exaggerated statement which nonetheless has a kernel of truth:

As bad as
Christianity and Judaism have been in the past (and may yet be again),
only Muslims reliably work themselves into a killing rage over the
mistreatment of a book; only Muslims murder their critics and
apostates; only Muslims can be counted upon to riot by the tens of
thousands over cartoons; and only Islam, with its doctrines of jihad
and martyrdom, is perfectly suited to spawn a global death cult of
suicidal terrorists.

The statement is quite an exaggeration. For instance, Muslims in general don't reliably work themselves into a killing rage about mistreatment of a book, or anything else; in fact, most of them never do any such thing. Properly stated, the point is that Islam is the only religion which reliably leads substantial numbers of adherents to into a killing rage about that.

Likewise, "only Muslims murder their critics" is misleading since most Muslims don't murder anyone. It must be replaced with, "Only Islam regularly motivates some adherents to murder its critics." Christianity may not be far behind, though, since it regularly motivates some adherents to murder doctors and condemn pregnant women to death from curable medical problems.

Most Muslims disapprove of terrorism; they believe killing innocent people is a sin. Most Muslims won't riot over cartoons or criticism of their religion, but many advocate censorship of such works. Many Muslims endorse the prohibition on ceasing to be a Muslim, even if they don't support killing those who try. We should not treat all Muslims as terrorists, but we need to press all Muslims to respect the human rights of people who disagree with them.

Just as Nixon's men hoped to personally discredit Daniel Ellsberg with stolen psychiatrist's notes, the US tries to personally discredit Julian Assange to distract people from the enormity of criminalizing journalism.

Nixon wanted to prosecute Ellsberg, too.

The Vatican wants to prosecute Gianluigi Nuzzi, the journalist who published leaked Vatican letters that reveal apparent cronyism and financial misdeeds.

Birth control chemicals coming untouched through sewage treatment plants interfere with the sexual maturation of fish, and can cause populations to shrink or disappear. Profitable drug companies don't want to pay to clean this up.

The US ambassador to Australia claims the US "is not interested" in Julian Assange, and that having him in Sweden would not help the US extradite him anyway. Assange's supporters present arguments that this is false.

Parts of the ambassador's statements seem like potential weasel-words: "There is no such thing as a secret warrant" may be true, but there may still be a secret indictment which could be used later to get a non-secret warrant.

It is also possible that the ambassador was intentionally given false information. That is a common tactic of governments. It would be interesting to ask the ambassador if he will resign in protest if that Assange is sent to Sweden and the US then asks to extradite him.

Obama would be ultimately responsible for lying to the ambassador, but he is proud of lying and weaseling.

The IEA says fracking according to the rules it recommends would lead to
disastrous global heating. But it buried that in page 91, and the mainstream media have ignored the point — presenting these rules as if they were a solution.

The bureaucrats meeting to discuss inadequate plans, and not admitting that they still lead to disaster.

The term "technocrat" used in that article is misleading because it implies that technology motivates the decisions. If our politicians were really technocrats, we would probably see a solution being implemented. But they are something much worse than technocrats: they are sellouts to the companies that profit by keeping humanity on the path to disaster.

That article proposes that we lead from below with our own projects. As was recently pointed out, such actions cannot address the problem, because the relentless logic of the market will push emissions elsewhere. Only political policy changes can reduce total emissions. However, local projects might be a way to create the political motivation for the policy changes we need.

Meanwhile, how about putting banksters on trial for attempted negligent mass homicide?

Campaigners in the UK for laws to impede tobacco marketing are receiving threats from irrational tobacco proponents.

The laws being considered would not interfere with buying or selling cigarettes, they would only interfere with the marketing methods used to hook new smokers. Thus, smokers have no reason to object to them. Only the tobacco companies have a reason to object.

I therefore suspect the people making these threats have been indirectly encouraged or funded by the tobacco companies.

The French Internet surveillance systems company Amesys is being investigated in France for supplying surveillance machines to Gaddafi.
Similar machines were installed in Tunisia, which is why I participated in an exorcism at Bull headquarters there. Amesys did not belong to Bull when those machines were installed, but I'm told Bull did the installation. This system in Tunisia is still operating.

There's nothing wrong with deciding about abortion based on the sex of the fetus. Women should be free to do that. The prejudice against women in some societies is nasty and foolish, but that's no reason to restrict abortion rights.

I have to acknowledge that most people should not have put their money in what is effectively a stock mutual fund. They, like many others, made the assumption that stocks go up and not down. However, I suspect the banks encouraged them to make this assumption and the state probably did nothing to stop them, so the principal responsibility lies with them.

While the continued imprisonment without trial is the greatest evil, giving Gazan prisoners fewer and shorter family visits than other Palestinian prisoners is the epitome of nastiness, because there is no plausible motive for it except malice.

Of course, the price of the gas won't include the cost of polluted water supplies and sick people. Worse, it won't take account of the certainty of global disaster due to global heating, until it is too late to avoid that.

The disaster released a tremendous amount of radioactive material into an even more tremendous ocean. The density in the water is tiny, but living organisms concentrate it. The amount in these tuna is not dangerous, but each species is a different case, so all the species people eat may need to be tested.

The Supreme Court decision which permitted this reflects the right-wing composition of the court, which is in favor of companies against people. Does anyone know whether the proposed amendment that human rights don't apply to corporations would reverse this decision?

Ms Woodhouse insulted people with no grounds, which is nasty as well as foolish. She also expressed naive political views. For instance, she condemns other Britons for using some of the insufficient public housing instead of condemning the government for allowing public housing to become scarce.

But that is no grounds for jailing someone. Imprisoning people for their opinions is tyranny.

To value a tropical forest at 30 million dollars can help protect the environment if it convinces the wealthy world to pay a million dollars a year to preserve the forest. But if that means allowing the wealthy world to pay 30 million to buy the forest and destroy it, it is does harm.

The idea of dividing up the total value of forests among the existing forest area is misguided because, if we lose half the existing forest, the remaining half will be even more precious than it is now.

The real difference between state-imposed poverty in North Korea and South Korea is great, but South Korean TV shows might give an exaggerated picture if they follow the same practice as the US: "ordinary" people on TV live in houses that are too expensive for ordinary Americans.

I suspect this is no coincidence. Subcontracting is the
consequence of business globalization, and business globalization was
intentionally constructed by treaties and other state policies that
were designed to favor business. Business got what it wanted, and
what it wanted was to push production into sweatshops.

The fragmentation of subcontracting does harm in other ways, too.
For instance, it interferes with pressuring manufacturers to
sell machines that we can support with free software.

I think the remedy is to undo the policy changes and treaties that
created this system of manufacturing. We should not allow businesses
to make workers in the US, China and Vietnam compete on pay.

The European austerity pact requires countries to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP each year. To try to do this by paying back the debt is hopeless, since that implies a spending cut which reduces GDP and increases that ratio.

I think this demonstrates the danger of media concentration. Future politicians will follow the same path as long as the Murdoch empire (or its successor) has so much power. They will simply find cleverer ways to disguise it.

This article confusingly treats "intellectual property" as a synonym for patents. That term should never be used because it spreads confusion.

Nortel got these patents "for defense", but they are being used for parasitism. If you work for a company that asks you to apply for patents "for defense", demand a deal like the one Twitter recently began offering, which promises to use them only for defense.

Rich Arab countries are trying to arm Syrian rebels, with US help, and they provoke Assad's army into responding with massacres.

This does not excuse the massacres; Assad and his men are responsible for what they do, and Assad's family members seem to be personally involved. But it does mean that the rebels are playing with civilians lives.

The article says "it is thought" that jihadis are responsible for the May 10 bombing in Damascus, but those who think this must not have paid attention to the defectors who say it was Assad's false flag operation.

The Taliban kill civilians too, even more of them, but Afghans resent the US bombings more. Why this bias? Why don't the killings of civilians by the Taliban make Afghans support Karzai?

Or perhaps the Taliban kill selected civilians that they suspect of collaborating with Karzai and NATO, and that gives civilians a way to be safe from them. But there is no way to be safe from NATO since it kills civilians randomly.

I don't know the answer, but it's clear that Karzai's lack of real loyalty is an important part of it. And that is why the US can't win in Afghanistan. It can only prop Karzai up.

The US government has dragged its heels in searching its files for evidence that might help Bradley Manning in his trial.

I don't think the trial can go forward without doing this, so why delay? Perhaps the government wants to delay the result of the trial. Perhaps till after the presidential election? That might make sense, but the trial was not expected to end before the election anyway. Thus, I can't see a plausible answer to this question.

One of the comments is from another person who uses an insulin pump,
who wrote, "I have an insulin pump, and twice I have had to go through
security with it, both times when I insisted on a manual inspection of
my insulin supplies and a pat down due to my pump I was refused".

This is supposed to teach them the right attitude to hold a job. That would make sense if the UK had lots of jobs offers but nobody ready and able to fill them. However, it does nothing about the real problem, which is a lack of job offers. It could even make that worse, since the companies that get work done for nothing might otherwise have hired people to do part of that work.

So it's simply a way of blaming and attacking the victims of austerity, while helping business yet again.

50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, we are damaging the environment more than ever, and the industrial forces that tried to smear Rachel Carson have more political power over our governments than they did then.

I find it implausible that Iran would brave so much pressure and sanctions to do its own uranium enrichment if it didn't have something to do with making nuclear weapons. However, I'm persuaded by reports already cited here that Iran is not yet trying to build them, and the idea that Iran aims to be ready to design and build them and stop there seems like a plausible interpretation.

Genetically modified organisms are not inherently bad. They can have biological harmful effects, but that is not inevitable. However, if farmers cannot freely breed them, they trample the farmers' rights, and that is what eliminates biodiversity. The cost of buying seed plus the chemicals they need puts farmers in danger of going broke and losing their land.

A whistleblower says one of the companies to which the UK is privatizing NHS operations has lied about its services.

Although the UK is not privatizing the NHS as such, contracting its operations to companies is still a form of privatization. Privatizing government operations, when it does not result in competition for the end user, is wrong in general.

The privatizers claim that businesses will increase efficiency, but in practice their profit usually comes from skimping on service, from charging more, from shafting the employees, or from fraud.

Such privatization is therefore a form of corruption, and when it has been done, it must be reversed.

The US-backed coup-installed government of Honduras said it was investigating the shooting that killed or wounded 8 boat passengers, but they don't seem to have tried very hard, since they didn't find the wounded passengers in the hospital.

What's needed is to take global actions that will reduce the total emissions.

That writer proposes the global action of sequestering as much CO2 as is emitted. That's one way to do it (though it wouldn't cover methane emissions, which also contribute to global heating), but as far as I know such sequestration is only in its experimental stages.

A sufficiently high tax on greenhouse gas emissions could also do the job. The money could be spent on sequestration if and when that technology is ready, but it would discourage consumption right away.

Cap-and-trade could do it too, if the system is set up so as to first limit and later reduce the net allowed emissions. Anyone doing sequestration could sell emission credits, and the eventual result would fairly similar in practice to what the writer proposed: most activities doing emissions would have to buy emission credit from sequestration.

Unfortunately, international negotiations about ending global heating have once again failed, apparently because the governments did not really want a deal.

The Senate Armed Service Committee voted to spend $90 million on tanks that the army does not need.

The stated purpose is to keep the plant open, but the army doesn't want to buy any more. So why not close the plant? It's not as if the US faced a threat of attack from a powerful tank army. This is only a cover reason, of course, but it's interesting that such a flimsy one is considered sufficient.

New York thugs tried to frame journalist student Alexander Arbuckle, who filmed a protest to document how professional and law-abiding the thugs were. He has been acquitted after presenting proof that the thugs lied.

I hope Arbuckle's exposure to the dark side of the thug has taught him not to think positively of them.

Meanwhile, where are the prosecutions for perjury? The thugs will continue what they called "testilying" until they cease to enjoy impunity when they lie.

Murder by treaty: as Bayer sues to block India's compulsory license for a cancer drug, Obama is trying to make the TPP forbid that practice.

The WTO is also murder by treaty; the US used it to make India to change its old, wise patent law, which allowed patenting improved methods to make drugs but did not allow patenting drugs. This encouraged the sort of research that India and other poor countries really need.

The African farmers may go broke as many Indian farmers did. I expect the result will be that megacorporations buy their land. Instead of killing themselves, as the destitute Indian farmers do, these destitute farmers might pick up guns and fight back.

Azerbaijan also preemptively arrested opposition leaders in advance, but instead of calling them “terrorists” as in Chicago, it just gave one of them a fine for “disobeying thugs' orders”, which is also a common excuse in the US for punishing protesters and halting protests.

US citizens: phone your senators to oppose S.1100, the hypocritically
named "Keeping Politics out of Federal Contracting Act", which would ban the president from requiring federal contractors to disclose their spending on electioneering.

Obama has not done this, despite many requests. This reflects the
fact that he's on their side. But people are trying to pressure
him to do it, so we need to keep Congress from blocking it.

PBS sold Chick-fil-A the right to use a PBS kids' show to market food to kids.

I am not surprised that PBS did this, because it has no principled stand on the matter. (Neither does NPR, even though it has not gone as far down the path of sellout.)

An organization that wants to get funds from companies and not be corrupted must draw a line and refuse to cross it. For the FSF, the line is that we will never present a nonfree program as a solution to any problem. Nonfree programs are the problem, not the solution.

The violence in Yemen must be understood against the background of a food shortage in which 10 million people don't have enough to eat.

It seems that this food shortage is permanent: Yemen cannot feed its population. The global price of food is likely to keep increasing (because of global heating, soil exhaustion, and other excesses of human activity), so the problem won't go away. A long-term solution must include birth reduction, to bring Yemen's population down to the number the country can support.

People who cannot feed their families should not have more children. It is inhumane to stand aside and let them starve, but it is self-defeating to help them make the problem bigger.

This suggests making the offer, "We will feed you for the rest of your life if you get sterilized now, but if you want to have children you're on your own."

What's amazing is the idea that there is something misguided about that judgment. Imagine a person on trial for shooting someone who argued, in court, "It's ok that I shot him, because at that point I hadn't shot anyone for many hours."

While I agree with the EFF that this should not be illegal, but I see something that might make it ethically unacceptable. Does the service use DRM to communicate with the user? That should be illegal.

The reason that campaign was wrong is that it spread distrust of vaccination campaigns. That could impede the eradication of polio, since one of the few remaining areas where polio is endemic is in Pakistan/Afghanistan.

However, 33 years in prison is too much. It smacks of endorsing al Qa'ida, and Pakistan cannot do that and present itself as being in the right.

I don't think a person can honestly claim to have swum across any particular body of water if he gets onto a boat sometimes. The only honest way to do this feat would be if you stay in the water all the way across. That might be difficult, even impossible without some better methods for resting. Being difficult is the point.

Bassem al-Tamimi, organizer of nonviolent protests, was convicted by an Israeli court based on evidence coerced from a 15-year-old.

Unjust governments occasionally admit they have imprisoned someone for political opposition, when they don't see a need to deny that they are tyrannical regimes. But more often they do wish to keep up the pretense. So instead of imprisoning someone for opposition, they fabricate evidence to convict the dissident of what pretends to be uncontroversially criminal. In Chicago, now, it's "terrorism".

This relates to John Holt's criticism of the compulsory public school as a sort of prison that crushes the spirit. (See How Children Fail, which may still be on sale from the organization he founded. Don't buy it from amazon!)

I had a small taste of it in a public high school, in an advanced
placement history course. But that was the rare exception, even in
New York City.

I disagree with Godin on one side point which I think is worth
mentioning. Godin argues that since manufacturing and mass activity
jobs have mostly moved out of America, and those that remain are lousy
hourly pay jobs, people should all aim for the sort of job that calls
for creativity.

Society could benefit from more people ready to be creative, and if
you're like me you will want work of that kind. But not everyone has
the talent for this, not everyone wants to do it, and a lot of the
work that's needed isn't creative. So if everyone did look for
creative jobs, only a fraction could get them. That is a solution for
some, but not for all.

I think society needs to be arranged so that the people who can't do
creative work can have a decent life too.

Alas, the article mentions the Khan Academy, which makes available
nonfree educational videos on a site that uses Flash.

The article uses the confusing term “intellectual property”, but without attributing it to Cerf. I wonder if Cerf stuck to clear terms such as "copyright" to avoid confusing unrelated laws, and the blogger undid that effort.

I agree that Anonymous should not use attacks — but that term should not include virtual protests ("DDOS attacks") or graffiti ("web site defacement").

A study of 2,000 people convicted in the US and later proved innocent includes over 1,000 that were framed by thugs who planted drugs or weapons on them. However, for the rest, erroneous eyewitness identifications are common causes of conviction.

It is hard for people to reliably recognize anyone they saw for a short time but don't know.

The US is spending billions to build an antimissile system on the West Coast to defend against hypothetical future North Korean nuclear missiles. Now Republicans want to build another such system on the East Coast for hypothetical future Iranian nuclear missiles.

The Hondurans who run the boat that was shot from helicopters say that their boat was, in effect, a river bus.

It's conceivable that one of the passengers had some drugs, just as on any bus in the US. Now imagine if the DEA shot at a bus with helicopters because there were reports that someone on the bus was carrying drugs.

They don't do this yet in the US, but in a few more years of increasing police state, it might happen.

The regime's claim that al Qa'ida is operating in Syria was blown to shreds by the defectors who reported how the regime set up a false flag operation to look like al Qa'ida.

To undo the sectarian aspect that Assad has injected will be harder.
However, if this means Syria must choose between oppression of the
Alawite minority and oppression of the Sunny majority, the former is
less bad. And it might be possible eventually to reconcile the
groups.

The big obstacle to aiding the rebels is that they are not militarily
in a position to be helped to win.

I call it the Heatland Institute because it has little heart, but wants to subject the Earth to lots of heat.

The Illinois Coal Association and the Heritage Foundation have taken up where previous donors left off. Now it will be possible to criticize those organizations for the billboard which they have effectively endorsed.

An investigation of Peter Gleick's published Heatland internal documents found that he did not (as alleged by Heatland) falsify anything.

I am not a great fan of her music, though I appreciate her hacker spirit. The article leads me to think that this song is a cheap attempt at shocking people (but I can't say I am sure of that; I have not heard it). But even if that's all it is, censoring it is wrong.

Laws punishing "insulting religion" are pure and simple injustice. So are laws punishing racial insults. It is foolish and sometimes nasty to judge someone else by her race, but people should not be imprisoned for folly or even nastiness.

The Dallas round of negotiations over the TPP (Trade Privilege Punishment?) agreement was another backroom deal, clearly intended to serve megacorporations.

If the TPP indeed has an "IP" chapter, its most basic error would be the use of the propaganda term "intellectual property", which frames whatever issues it is applied to in a confusing way favorable to the benificiaries of various diverse privileges.

I say "if" because, thanks to the secrecy, I don't think we know whether the TPP uses that term.

I am sure the rest of the TPP attacks the public interest in other areas. When a government participates in these negotiations, that indicates it has decided to betray its citizens to the megacorporations. You should only vote for candidates that are opposed to the whole idea.

These people probably know the difference between corporations and legislators, but they are also aware that nowadays the legislators mostly take orders from the corporations. They are resigned to the continuation of this anti-democratic system.

But that is their error. It only continues because they don't rise up and put an end to it.

However, I think that if we are to end it, we must do so beyond the one issue of copyright. If we are to strip the copyright companies of their political power, we need to do the same to other companies.

The idea of democracy, since ancient Athens, is that the non-rich unite to be stronger than the rich and deny the latter any special political power. Democracy today is a hollow shell because it fails to do this. To restore democracy means ending the companies' power.

Once the disaster occurred, there may have been no way they could avoid doing so, since TEPCO was surely not going to have earnings to cover the cost of the work. The conclusion is, if your country allows nuclear power plants to be built, it is going to cost you a lot when something goes wrong.

It looks like natural problems with the previous integrated pest management system for corn created trouble, and Monsanto jumped in to forestall solution within the scheme of integrated pest management.

These are the same companies, I would guess, that will drive thousands of farmers off their land. The profit will go to companies like Monsanto. Thus, this plan is an orwellian scheme to hurt poor Africans disguised as help.

75 US journalists have been arrested since September. Mostly for making recordings of the thugs' actions in public places.

Even though courts and the Justice Department have upheld citizens' right to make recordings of thugs at work, the thugs continue to make bogus threats. I believe the only way to stop them is to prosecute each one.

The more repressive Ethiopia gets, the more aid its government receives.

The Ethiopian state persecutes journalists and political opposition, often calling them "terrorists" and imprisoning them without trial. And it sends armies into other countries. For the US government, what's not to love?

We should distinguish two questions here: whether some sort of intervention can turn a homosexual into a heterosexual, and whether homosexuality constitutes a disorder or problem.

If it were indeed possible to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, that would not imply that homosexuality is a mental disorder. Many conditions that are not disorders can be changed nowadays. It is possible to surgically convert males into females and vice versa, but that does not imply that maleness and femaleness are medical disorders.

Contrariwise, the fact that it isn't possible to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals does not prove homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Paralysis is clearly a disorder, and usually there is no cure for it.

The reason I do not regard homosexuality as a disorder is that there is no objective reason to consider it an impairment, and homosexuals don't consider it one.